atjohnekins
Wide Open is not a collection meant to be read quietly. It's meant to be felt. Each word, each line, is a small fracture - a moment when the mask slips and something real breaks through. These poems came from nights when silence was too heavy, mornings when light didn't feel like salvation, and days when the simplest act - breathing, showing up, pretending - was a rebellion.
This work lives somewhere between grief and grace. It speaks to the ones who smile in public and unravel in private, who fight for their lives in carpool lines and conversations, who hold love and loneliness in the same trembling hand.
I don't write to explain pain or beautify it. I write to name it. To look at it directly and say, I see you. I survived you. Some poems bleed, some pray, some laugh in the face of despair - but they all reach toward something: truth, maybe, or peace, or just the next breath.
If you find yourself somewhere in these pages, know that you are not alone. These poems are wide open - because healing, like art, begins when we stop hiding the wounds.
- AJ Taylor