Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Dear girl,
don't be sad,
never lose hope,
for ever they say bad.
-
Remember then,
By God's grace, haven't they been from
the womb of a mother?
-
Let your beauty lie in your Character,
Let your Modesty be,
the answer to their liberal thoughts,
Let the purity lie in your heart .
-
Remember, you're
God’s creation,
A Father's child,
Some one’s fate,
And will be the role model for others.
-
Never lose hope,
Let the dog’s bark
at the Modesty of a Lioness,
for you know
may how many they be
they can't change the good in you.
For you are the Real QUEEN
-
anna Jan 31
The mirror shines an echo of reality
a thousand times blurrier than I see.
The white lies praise closure, toxic autobiography,
as wax eyes glaze over, magnetic abnormality.

Painted mouth, a harsh sculpted shape.
Torn plastic hair, a blocked-off escape.
Between the fluorescence and the silver reply
the fruits of my labour or a sordid
fruit fly?

The scars on my shoulders, the spots on my face;
saturated colours polluting the lace.
Rouge tinted balm, a turned sickly ochre,
My elbows together,
shoulders narrower, triangular figure;
carved by an egoist, all angles and fissures.

The moisturiser refuses to sink into my skin,
a tantaliser of trial, on the surface, a swim.
Impenetrable, inaccessible, my hands rip the surface.
A false doll face with a fast fading purpose.
Evly Jul 18
Girl, you are no puppet.
You are not made to entertain.
You are imperfect and should love it—
That you are beautifully whole—
Despite the pain.

Not in batting eyes,
Lies the truth of what a woman is.
It’s in the red she bleeds
And in the dreams her wounded heart keeps—
Aching to be perfect, yet
Unknowing, brings life to earth.

She needs no angel hair or curves refined,
Nor tall, nor petite must she be.
She is the soul that breathes life,
Not the heart that seeks validation,
For she is heaven’s whispered gift,
A light that lifts, a spirit swift.
Cadmus Jul 6
👸

He wanted a bride with untouched skin,
A pastless girl he could fold right in.
She said the truth - soft, honest, still:
“I’ve known love… and I’ve known thrill.”

His smile cracked.
His eyes turned cold.
As if her fire made his soul old.

He left - proud. Untouched. Intact.
A man so fragile, truth felt like attack.

Now he prays for purity in the dark,
While she is out -  leaving teeth marks

👸
This piece speaks to the quiet cruelty of men who worship purity but fear depth - who want untouched women not out of reverence, but control. It’s not about virtue. It’s about fragility disguised as pride.
White Owl Apr 14
The moon has yet again been touched
On every side by light of sun,
And with the unrelenting march of time,
A new lament's begun.
What good's a heart made heavy
By affections idle and unspent?
And what's a sanctuary
Where no precious thing is ever sent?
Come to me soon, my hope and vision,
Longingly I wait for you!
Imagination mocks me
With a stream of fancies not yet true!
Your face, it is an ever-shifting blur
I almost can behold,
Bejeweled with dark and starry eyes
That shine as freshly polished gold.
Your skin, it would be tender,
Colored peach-pink with a brush of rose,
Your tiny form light as a cloud
In my embrace as you repose.
Your smile, it would contain the sunlight,
And your laugh, the breath of spring,
And as you dream in peace embosomed,
To you I would softly sing.
These images delight me
And revive the fires of my heart,
But then the vapors from which they were made
All scatter and depart.
Oh little unformed soul,
Your warmth within my arms I still know not.
Your phantom weight upon my chest
Has many hopes and sorrows wrought.
The record keepers of the sky've
Declared another wait in vain,
So let this wasted flesh mourn with me
In these coming days of rain.
Dec '25
lifelover Sep 2019
every evening i slaughter the sun.
every evening i cut her up on unforgiving mountain peaks
i dip her blood orange blistered flesh in saltwater;
i do this for the moon.
the sun gurgles as she drowns
Izan Almira Apr 15
Two flowers grew
in my blue heart;
a pink one
that carried
the art of showing weakness,
the love for children,
the deep care that lies within
well-thought actions,
delicacy
and
complexity
and a blue one
that carried
the impulse to protect others
at any cost,
companionship,
simplicity,
fidelity,
and strength.

They tried
to cage,
rip apart,
chop off,
uproot
and
burn
the pink flower.

To destroy it
until it bled
and they could drain
all the warmth
from my
sea-colored
heart.

But we were never made for
lonely colors,
and in every blue
there is a shade of purple
and pink.

So with the strength of a god
and the resilience of a saint,
the pink flower
loomed
and raised until it touched the sky
stronger than ever,
in my heart
made of blue-toned gold.
fray narte Mar 30
My mother’s white, quiet patience sways,
tantalizing before me like a well-lit crystal chandelier in my grandmother’s house.
I never take a bite of it,
an ever so-careful child, my grandmother used to fondly describe me,
a picky eater;
I never grew bigger than I used to be — still so small and scrawny,
a shivering child left crying in our bahay kubo, awaiting my mother’s return.
She comes home and laughs at my innocent anxiety.

It is a promised heirloom, it seems,
my mother’s white, quiet patience — well-kept in my late grandmother’s bedroom
where my father can never find
for his hands to choke and tear like an old 90s letter —
I was in her womb and he was in Egypt
down with the mummified pharaohs; she sent him poems
and I got a tiny glass pyramid, a snow of gold dust
I spun it — turned it upside down
until it broke, bathing me golden like a tiny sun.
I hid in my late aunt’s room, next to my mother’s mute patience,
it spills like milk, drenches like tears, blinds like a ray of light.

I can never inherit my mother’s patience but I wear her skin now;
twenty years, I have grown bigger, taller
and her sorrows and regrets fit me well like a brown, fur coat,
a pocket full of resentment, of repressed aching, of fingers numb from writing poems;
my mother was a poet, I know this now;
my father — an ordinary man,
his chest is a hollow chamber in a pyramid far, far away in Giza.
Sometimes, I think he’s still there, lying next to pharaohs
for all of perpetuity.
Sometimes, I think I have inherited his mystery
his tendency to perplex the eye, like a pyramid of secrets and secrets,
the archaeologists have given up after unearthing empty chambers after empty chambers,
Maybe there is nothing here to see
but dead, young, unloving bones
next to earthworms burrowing on my mother’s poems.

I can never inherit my mother’s patience; sometimes I think
she has left her aching somewhere in our bahay kubo,
in my dollhouse, perhaps, and I have picked it up
like a spiral seashell,
like Barbie’s tiny suitcase looking pretty in glitter,
swallowed in a single gulp, it’s still here inside me,
growing and poking and tearing and disfiguring,
I refuse to spit it out.
How do I carry it when she herself has not?
I scratch my limbs at the injustice.

My mother’s white, quiet patience sits in Lola Glo’s room,
like a ghost that never haunts but I wish it did —
sometimes, I still wait for damning screams, for broken windows,
for love poems burning in hell for its sins,
taking me down with them.
Sometimes, I still wait for her to leave
like a Macedonian queen fleeing Egypt and never coming back.

Then, I would have nothing to carry, nothing to wear,
nothing to ache for at starless nights —
no poems to open and seal like a stone entrance to a pharaoh’s chamber.
My mother’s white, quiet patience is an unlit crystal chandelier,
a few feet on top of my head. I laugh and spin like a tornado,
like a mad girl, swinging and raising my arms like I was five —
I hit and shatter everything in sight
then blame it on the fairies.
I eat the fine, hand-cut, polished crystals, I bleed poison on my tongue,
and my mother is Cleopatra nowhere to be found.

Everything is an accident, even my intentional carelessness,
now paper-white and porcelain-clean.
Everything is forgiven, even my father’s loud, beer-laced cruelty,
even my hands, closed in a fist.
My mother’s smile was bright and comforting,
but everything is an earthworm feeding on her poems.
And every poem is a poem till it rots

beneath a far-off, sun-swept Egypt.
Published in Issue Six: Daughterhood of Astraea Zine
Link: https://www.astraeazine.com/issue-six
Kate Feb 3
My only crime was to have been born a woman.
a crime with no trial, no verdict, just sentence.
The world does not break us all at once;
it whittles, peels, pares us down
until we fit the hollow it has carved.

They say we are too much.
Too loud, too soft, too sharp, too small.
A contradiction they built,
then condemned for its shape.

We fold ourselves into corners,
tuck our rage beneath our tongues,
wrap our worth in apologies
and call it survival.
That is not living— it is simply existing.

But we are not ghosts.
Not echoes of something lesser.
We are steel spun fine,
fire woven into silk—
soft does not mean breakable.

We are here.
We have always been here.

And we are not leaving quietly.
Next page