impact

🔪 🩸poetry corner 🔪 🩸

We are the girls who bruise easily—
which is to say
the world leaves a stain.

Not out of sentimentality.
Not because we’re precious.

Just poor internal housekeeping:
everything that happens to us
refuses to leave.

A hand, a table corner,
a moment that pressed too hard—
all of it blooms eventually,
rising to the surface like
see? see? it mattered.

Our bodies are terrible liars.

We try to be like other women—
smooth, unbothered,
pristine in all the socially acceptable ways.
We say I’m fine
and our skin says
that’s false.

We call it clumsiness
to keep things light.

We laugh, lift a sleeve,
offer up the evidence:
a constellation of small violences
with no good story attached.

This one? Don’t worry about it.
This one? It’s nothing.

But nothing
doesn’t turn purple.

Nothing doesn’t ache
when you press it.

Nothing doesn’t linger
long after the moment has passed,
changing colors like it’s
trying to explain itself.

Here’s the part we don’t say:
it might be a kind of gift.

To register impact.
To refuse erasure.

To have a body that insists,
even quietly, even inconveniently,
that contact occurred.

Proof of living,
if you want to be dramatic about it.
And we usually do.

Because what is a life
that doesn’t bruise?

What is a day
that leaves no trace?

We have never been good
at letting things slide off.
We absorb. We record.
We carry.

It shows.

Of course it shows.

And yes, it makes us softer
in all the ways people warn you about.
Yes, it makes us easier to hurt.
Yes, it means we remember
what others forget.

But it also means this:

we are never mistaken
about whether something touched us.

We know, with a certainty,
we were here.
Something happened.
It mattered.

They fade, eventually—
the way everything does.

But for a while—
brief, undeniable—

we are marked
by having felt it.

This is for all the people who have passed out and crashed into the side of the bathtub. Or is that just me…

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