I Contain Multitudes
There are women inside me
who would not recognize one another
and still share the same blood.
One believes in mercy.
One keeps a knife.
One still waits
for someone to come back.
One has already buried the door.
I love them all.
Even the ones
who embarrass me.
Especially the ones
who kept breathing
when breathing was not noble.
I contain the girl
who thought love meant endurance.
The woman
who learned endurance
is sometimes only another word
for staying too long.
I contain the believer
and the question.
The altar
and the ash beneath it.
I contain hunger
that has nothing to do with emptiness.
Softness
that has survived every attempt
to turn it into weakness.
There are flowers in me
growing through old gravesites.
There are bones
I have built new rooms around.
There are ghosts
I no longer fear
because I know which ones are mine.
I am not seamless.
I do not want to be.
There are seams
where the old selves were stitched
to the new ones.
There are places
where the thread still shows.
That is not failure.
That is construction.
I can be deeply content
and still ache for more.
I can want quiet
and still dream in cathedrals.
I can crave tenderness
and still have teeth.
I can forgive
without reopening the grave.
I can love someone
and still belong entirely to myself.
I have spent too many years
watching people mistake complexity
for confusion.
I am not confused.
I am crowded.
There is a difference.
I contain the woman
who wants to disappear
into rain, books, old houses,
and rooms with no clocks.
I contain the woman
who wants her name
printed where strangers can find it.
I contain the woman
who knows how to rest.
The woman
who knows how to ruin herself
for a dream.
The woman
who is learning
not to confuse those two.
Some days I am relic.
Some days I am fire.
Some days I am the hand
pulling both from the wreckage.
I do not ask my light
to explain my shadow.
I do not ask my shadow
to apologize for the shape
it gives the light.
I am not built around being desired.
I was here before the gaze.
I will remain
after it turns away.
I am the archive
of every woman
I survived becoming.
And I have stopped
cutting pages out
just because someone else
finds the book easier
when it is shorter.