Inheritance of Thorns
A creature pinned under glass,
stitched into silence with silver thread.
A doll with eyes too wide,
stuffed with fear and feathers,
posed just right for praise that felt like poison,
frozen in a smile you carved into me
with a voice too loud to be questioned.
I was your cracked reflection,
the hollow echo of your bitterness
shamed into stillness,
taught that love meant obedience,
meant shrinking beneath your thunder
and calling the storm “discipline.”
But I came undone.
Clawed out of the display case
with fingernails grown jagged in the dark,
tore each stitch loose with my teeth,
peeled your name from my skin
like paint from rotting walls.
I wear my trauma like antlers
blood-slick, brutal,
curved with history and hunger.
Each tine a chapter
of things you swore I imagined:
the slamming doors,
the names hissed like hexes,
the way your love
felt more like war.
I carry the ghosts of the men before you
stone-fisted and salt-tongued
who taught their daughters
to fear their own fire,
to swallow their voices
like rusted nails.
But I grew fangs
and fed on the rot.
I named the monster,
even when it shared my blood.
Even when it wore your face
and said it was protecting me.
Now I am not still.
I am storm and skin and sacred howl.
I am not nice. I am not quiet.
I am not your legacy.
I am the daughter
of a woman who grew gardens
in broken places,
who showed me music in the wind
and beauty in old bones.
I am the one who crawled
out of a family tree
and set the roots ablaze
just enough
to see what could bloom
in the soot.
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