She

She isn't just torn but ripped, layer by layer,

like a memory they tried to erase but couldn’t

Her face breathes through the paper wounds, yet fragile

Beauty sculpted in silence,

held hostage by the war behind her eyes.

Her skin is parchment and burnt

Each scar is a sentence she wasn’t allowed to finish

I don’t just see her, I feel her screaming through the cries of her lips and through those closed eyes,

This is not serenity this is stillness from drowning

the last breath before she lets herself become ash

And her chest cracked with dark veins

like burnt branches screams of a heart that learned how to keep beating without being heard

indeed there was a voice in that silence

This isn’t art,

This is survival wearing makeup.

This is what it looks like when someone dies

in pieces and still learns to walk again with bones made of fire.

I ache,

Not just for her but because I am her

we are all her

Torned by hands that called it love,

stitched back together by the parts of ourselves

we weren’t meant to carry that tarried all night

She is not weak

she is the quiet howl of every woman

who burned in silence and cam

e out burning still but unafraid.