Writers Jam

one day, when asked i hope i will introduce myself as a poet not as a name that tastes like iron and echoes like an apology rehearsed too often i don’t want to be introduced as the girl whose name folds itself into corners of conversations a name that people lower their voices for as if uttering it might summon the ghost of every mistake i’ve ever made because my name is a cautionary tale a lighthouse that never learned to glow only to warn ships that storms were born from people like me but poet poet is a softer kind of tragedy a prettier word for a person who keeps trying to translate heartbreak into something the world might keep yet even then they’d say: “don’t be a poet like her she stitched her wounds into verses until even the bleeding began to rhyme.” sometimes i think poetry is just a museum of my failures displayed under gentle lighting so people call it art instead of survival. my heart, poor thing, keeps leaking metaphors as if ink is the only way it knows how to stay alive. and every poem i write feels like a funeral for a version of me no one even noticed had died. there are nights i whisper my own name just to see if it still fits but it hangs loose like a dress i outgrew in the middle of a storm. so maybe it’s better if i introduce myself as a poet so the world doesn’t have to carry the weight of knowing me before it meets my words maybe then i won’t have to explain why my laughter trembles why my shadows follow too closely why my dreams always smell like something burning and maybe someone somewhere will still read me and say, “she fell apart beautifully.” maybe that’s all i’ve ever been a quiet catastrophe disguised as a stanza. maybe i am the poem the universe keeps rewriting because it still hasn’t learned how to save me properly.