These are the ones I wasn’t ready for.

The ones that found the bruise before I could cover it. That reached under the ribs, into the throat, into the basement I’d locked from the inside. These are poems that made me cry. Or made me bite down. Or made me leave the room and come back slower. They didn’t ask for interpretation. They didn’t care if I understood. They just… landed.

Some of them felt like grief. Some like recognition. Some like someone naming the thing I’d buried in plain sight. But every one of them did something to my body I couldn’t stop. Gooseflesh. Pinned lungs. That awful exquisite ache that says: you’re still here.

So I kept them. And I’m giving them to you. Not because they’re beautiful. But because they broke something open. Because they stayed warm in my hands long after I stopped reading.

Read slowly. Breathe if you can.

Some of them still hurt.