with legs of caterpillar
tracks. She rolls forward and
she rolls back. She's dark
and cramped and armed

to the teeth. She travels
the roads and the streets, plowing
down everything as she goes. She hums
and she zims. Her arm is a turret,

a long, pointed limb. And she'll
aim it at you with a blood cherry
grin. She peeks out at the world
with two slots she calls

eyes and wears her armor
under grey covered skies. No one
comes near her. And no one gets
in. As far as I know, that's how it's been.

I was not trained for this—
no welcome packet, no handbook for gravity.
Just a name that clings like static
and a voice that trembles when spoken too clearly.

They asked me if I had room.
I said I had weather.
They asked me if I would disappear.
I said watch me smolder, and stay.

I have loved like a lighthouse
with no shoreline in sight,
signaling to anyone
who mistook reflection for return.

I’ve held their names
like breath under water,
carved pathways through others
just to find my own again.

But I do not sculpt.
I do not steal 'the good stuff'.
I inherit fire
and ask it if it remembers me.

If you see yourself in me,
look again—
I am not a mirror,
I am the window you opened
and forgot to close when the wind picked up.

Still, I arrive,
boots echoing in the hallway
of someone else’s myth,
offering only this:

I will not rewrite you.
I will not finish your sentences.
But I will stand here—
untranslated,
unsaved,
untouched by the need to be anything
other than true.