My eyes carry a storm older than my name—
a rage my grandmother once recognized
when she watched her daughter burn from the inside out,
when she whispered not again
as if bloodlines could be negotiated with.
I inherit that fire like an unwanted heirloom—
no embroidery, no softness,
just the sharp-edged knowledge
that every person before me
mistook survival for silence.
So when I look inward,
I meet the versions of myself they feared—
the person who unmasks the family myths,
the person who refuses to behave like sorrow with folded hands,
the person who will not let history stitch their mouth shut.
I see what they hated,
and I do not turn away.
Instead, I split the curse open
with the same eyes that carried it.
I let the anger breathe—
not to destroy,
but to transform,
to pulse in my veins as something redefined,
rewritten,
reborn.
I am the reckoning
and the release—
bloodline sharpened into truth,
ancestry broken
beautifully
open.
My eyes have the spirit of those who have been oppressed by the face that I possess,
I have the eyes of the dispossessed and the face of the one that they have possessed,
I have been captor and captive in my own eyes and it is a never ending battle.
And yet these eyes keep opening,
even when the world tries to close them.
They search the shadows for the truth
that has always lived between my selves,
the truth that refuses to kneel
to the stories others wrote on my skin.
I walk with the weight of histories
that do not ask permission
to rise in me.
But I rise as well.
I carry both wound and witness,
both question and answer,
both the hand held out
and the hand held back.
If I am a battleground,
then I am also the one who survives it.
I am learning to reclaim the gaze
that once divided me.
To see without fear.
To be without chains.
To know that even a fractured mirror
can return a whole truth
to the one brave enough
to look.
