Words stuck in my lungs for months
Suddenly became butterflies escaping my mouth
And I didn't have to be afraid
Because you made sure to save them inside of your head
Every single one of them

You encouraged me to cut the flowers
Growing in my lungs, preventing me from breathing
Like weeds I unplucked them
And you made sure to save them

You dried them between the pages of your book

Took once or twice a look
But never ever dared to throw them away

I am the queen of stutter.
There was a time every creak and crack in my bones resonated between every slur of a word and every pop in my vowels.
I was a young girl with a white picket fence and yet there were still moments when words mixed and broke and-and-and-and
kids thought it was weird.
So I hid the voice with lollipops and suckers because I was
"That kid" and the "Freak" and I started to believe it like I believed my mothers bedtime stories that rested in her cheeks.
I was a broken jar and no matter how many times you tried to put me back together I always broke again and again and again.

There was a time where words came out together,
like a butterfly hatching from a cocoon and instead having feathers. I spoke with a voice of the age of four and before I was five I spoke no more because ****, vowels came out like clicks and grinds and everyone told me they paid no mind but I knew that they hated it liked I hated consonants. And I think the reason I hated it so much was because it reminded me too much of her and it made me feel like I was turning into her and all I could see was her standing over me like a murderer stands over a corpse and for a moment I forgot what it meant to be cradled to a chest, fluttering with a beating heart.



The first time my mother left, It was June.
She gave me a kiss on both cheeks and said she'd be away for awhile but that her love for me was longer than any mile that she would have to cross. I kissed her on both cheeks and it wasn't until she left that I realized that I was the one pushing her out the door. So when my dad came home from work he found an empty house and nothing more, he knew where to find me. I sat out in the pouring rain on a swing set that was older than my veins and waited to be saved to be rescued to be heard to be found to be be be be be be
I, was the queen of stutter.
And I had dropped that off when I moved from the city and I started a new life, carving it out of the trees outside with motivation and a knife. I did not yet understand that life was difficult.
But then my mother did not return and my father got scared because she had been the only one to ever love him the way he needed to be loved. And I did not understand so I started to carve life out of my palms and wrists and every **** kiss and nothing was ever good enough. I was the kid that turned to pill bottles and drugs but it was a metaphors for my dying bones and cracking lips. I breathed air that was blue and told my dad lies that were true and I was lost in a lost world, where being found was something that happened when you were dead and God, I wanted to be found.

So the story continued on and I wrote poetry to encompass my heart and my lungs and I painted over myself, scribbled all the mismatches and righted out all of the wrongs. Life seemed to continue and my dad had been injecting life into his veins and had been living at the doctors and had been tired all the time and had been lonely and sad and had been gone. He promised me a graduation and maybe even my wedding if he was lucky. I took these words with me everywhere I went and trust me if I could marry now I would in a heart beat.

I am fifteen.
My marriage has not yet come but I feel like I have all the time in the world and the doctor is only a place my dad goes to visit now. I can make words come out of my mouth the way they appear in my head and I now know the meaning to carving life into my bones and into the hues of the sunset. I am no longer afraid of every click and grind and twist and churn in my brain because it reminds me that I am alive and breathing and that my veins are filled with blood and that I breathe air like every other person does.
I was the queen of stutter.
Now I am the queen of hope.

An innocent born into darkness,
A life unknown to be so graceless.
A world without colour,
This life like no other.

Below the depths of this flesh,
A girl lives craving new breath.
Stolen was her beating heart,
Given to loneliness, consumed as a withered spark.

The biggest dreams swim in her mind,
The longest amount of time goes by.
A slave to abuse, a slave to misery.
Will she escape from the chains to find victory?

Fortitude is what she seeks,
Peace and love is what she needs.
A life ready to begin and restart,
Her life ready to fight her way through the dark.

A journey has started, her journey awaits.
An adventure she'll recall,
has her saving grace.

“Arise” she screams,
“Arise and be...”
“Arise and be all that you dreamed!”

Today, I tried to comfort my 13 year-old self,
But there was nobody there, nobody listening.

It's so cold over there,
So lifeless and sad.
And come to think of it,
I'd rather be mad.

She cries in the middle of the night, hoping one day things would be different.
Then wonders "what if" and suddenly she's indifferent.
And there's nobody there, nobody listening.

I try to make this life as vibrant as can be
For her to finally see
That this is as good as it's gonna get
And that there's nothing she should regret.

But still she storms off in the middle of the night,
Screaming:
"Is anybody there, anybody listening?"

My inner child shrieks and cries violently
As if we’re in a car that’s going off the cliff.
I sob as all the words I can tell her are,
“If this ends,
All the pain ends today as well.”