I often stop mid-sentence because my mouth cannot formulate what my mind is carrying.
I choke on my own distaste.
Thoughts come and go, but the world is always listening.
I often stop mid-sentence because no words can fully explain the severity of what has happened.
No language can hold my grief, my loss, my pain.
My mind circles the same thoughts.
I keep putting pen to paper.
I keep writing, and writing, and thinking,
but I never say it.
I never read it out loud.
I never hand my thoughts over to the world.
My poems are meant to be digested in silence,
read in a dark room
or on your way to work,
when maybe you realize you should not have started reading,
but now you can’t stop.
My poems are meant to be processed internally,
to make you think,
to make you sit with my truth.
Because the words I write
are the words I never got to say
to my past,
to my grandmother,
to worlds and people who no longer exist.
So instead of giving them
to a world that does not deserve them,
I bury them in the page.
what’s left unsaid is
a reason to write
a reason to live
a way to use my voice without having to open my mouth
without tasting the pain on my tongue
that metallic, lingering bitterness
that sits at the back of my throat
like something I cannot swallow
or spit out
without biting down on the hurt
until my jaw locks
until it travels up my face
and settles behind my eyes
until I convince myself
it isn’t there
because when—