Selected Poems:
These poems talk about the secret struggles of women who are seeking safety and shelter from domestic violence. They show the silent battles that happen behind closed doors.
1. She Wanted to Replace Kill with a Metaphor
A woman’s internal struggle to express the severity of her circumstance.
She Wanted to Replace Kill with a Metaphor
I wanted to write what he said, the way he said he’d kill me, as if it were nothing, but I tried to soften the edges, shape each word into something I could carry in my mouth, smooth the jagged sounds, bury them in ink. You’d think it would make it easier, to let rage settle like sediment, hidden between the lines. But the words splintered, a bruise under skin, changing color.
I tried to write leave but my hand slipped, found something softer. I wanted gone but it broke my skin raw.
So I let the paper hold it, something that sits, unseen. Isn’t this how pain stays, finding a way to settle, warm as an ember lodged in bone, close enough to mistake for safety.
I meant to say it, but reach instead for softer words. Stay, I write, and it tastes like salt. Love, I write, and it tastes of rust. There are so many ways to leave a body, so many ways to name what goes missing. In the end, I write it, the word he left hanging between us. Kill. I put it down, sharp and clean, let the letters bleed into the spine.
2. What a Modern Woman Doesn’t Say
A woman who presents herself as sharp and open but hides the emotional abuse she endures.
What a Modern Woman Doesn’t Say
I am this age, this woman, sharp, funny, an open book. My son, his dark nights; my mother, her hard words. The mess of work, the grind of faith and politics, the weight of every opinion I’ve honed to a point. Except that one time, on the way to the grocery, I said something about tomatoes, and he stopped the car, left me standing in gravel, empty-handed, wondering if I’d crossed a line over a vegetable.
Or last week, watching a movie, I made a joke, a small quip about a scene, and he turned, eyes like shut doors. That night I curled into the sheets, lonely as the hum of the fan melted into the cries of the nighthawk. My voice can cut through anything. They see the glint, the way I laugh, how I shrug off the dark, but not this, not here. I carry this shame like an heirloom jewel, tucked where no one can see how I fold under his gaze, where my voice falls and shatters like glass.
That I walk like a shadow tethered, always half-stepping to someone else’s rhythm.
I am this new age woman, carrying a silence so well-worn it passes for pride.
3. The Kitchen War
Surrounded by knives—both literal and metaphorical—the speaker navigates fear and tension within her own home.
The Kitchen War
I am surrounded by knives, their edges gleaming like the lips of rivers. Flames licking at my back. I know where the danger lies, the terms of survival: how to hold a blade close. But the real fear sits in the empty bowl, in shelves picked bare, the hollow hunger in my children’s eyes. My husband calls me a thief. The money he handed over like a debt, now lost to some hidden vice, and I, the silent conjurer, am the waste he names. This is a war without weapons. Knives sharp only in silence. What they don’t see is I am both fire and oil, spitting in small explosions, the blade held to the silence. There’s nothing left to conjure here, no feast pulled from thin air. Just the waiting hunger of knives in the dark, the patience of the empty table. I cut and stir, I slice the quiet open, a liturgy for what refuses to come.
This post is an entry to the Saranggola Awards 2024.
