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Poem submitted to “Inward Journey” poetry contest, Nayda Ivette Negron Flores, sponsor, July 6, 2026
The inward journey is not a path but a pulse~ a quiet thrum beneath the ribs that asks me to follow without promising arrival. It begins in the soft collapse of outward noise, in the moment the world’s demands fall away like dust from a long-closed book. I walk without moving, descending through layers of my own unspoken history~ the rooms I locked, the names I whispered, the truths I folded into the smallest corners of my breath. Here, memory becomes terrain. Regret becomes weather. Desire becomes a compass that points not north but inward, toward the place where my oldest questions still glow. And standing in that small room of light, its lone ember breathing softly, I realize the inward journey is a homecoming~ a gentle turning toward the oldest version of myself, the one that never left.
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