One by one, her words vanished until there were none le–

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my mouth lives as a rusted gate, aged from words sheltered within for so long.
closed for so long you’d think it’s a casket, earthworms and atomic bombs lay dormant, bones of all the “i wish i would’s and could’s” claws on its metal hinges. 

such a buried, haunted thing.

begging to be let out, explored, consumed. i want to breathe you, but these pearly whites won’t concede. their manifesto was scribed by martyrs and anarchists who burned bridges — burned hopes of ever finding something worthy of destruction. 

Girly’s with pretty pretty eyes and clean skin ooze hearty laughs, 
and my cheeks outstretch themselves in 
an attempt to remain open 

long enough for something– 

hellfire scorches my lips, making them chapped.

burns my tongue and swells my gums.

“be quiet, girl.” 

see how there’s no Y in this statement? i’m no girly.

just a mute thing.

my knees release their stiffness and propel me to run. 

run away, girl. you don’t belong 

here.

Helen had nothing on me, but Troy did.

there once was a time when words were holy ground, and Men would worship its feet like a false god, sacrificing themselves daily for something worth praising. Men would caress my skin, and grip firmly my jaw.

“Speak,” He ordered. 

my mouth released all its contents; every word, every syllable, and every idea flourished. everything i had was birthed into the atmosphere, the biggest explosion of the cosmos to occur in that century. i was an enigma of warrior’s wounds, accelerant of earthquakes. 

Helen had nothing on me, but Troy did.

He knew i was not worthy of being an idol. then, 

Murphy created His First Law. You know the one. 

Everything that can go wrong, will. 

thus, my words became a bunched basket of empty cradles. my teeth snarled at the aspirations of syllables, my tongue rolled into every other word like bowling pins, and my gums swelled at the idea of ideas – swelled at the idea of ever being heard

  again. 

i became and remained just a poor little mute thing. 

finding this out, the Men stoned me, cracking every one of my words open. 

leaving them gaping,

defenseless.

massacring my words for the survival of their own, and soon

i forgot how to move, how to breathe, how to speak. 

my voice became formless, and my throat remained a barren well of

sult and blood – praying to one day ooze as its Ancestors did.

Process

After working for weeks with my Peer mentee, Asma Al-Masayabi, doing 10-minute free-write drills to prompts, we discovered, through indecisive, we decided to write to the prompt: I’m afraid you’ll end up seeing me the way I see myself. I am unsure where this prompt was found; it was probably Pinterest. However, after reading Asma’s beautiful take on the prompt, I was encouraged and set on doing this prompt. One morning, on my way to school in the New York City subway system, I wrote a rough draft of the prompt, and from that point, I knew I struck gold.