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| Self Portrait, 2026 |
I was born with a fist in my throat
and a howl in my spine.
The doctors said girl but what they meant was
weapon, disguised as soft thing.
My mother knit me from her own unraveling,
thread pulled from wounds she never named.
I came out fighting—
cord wrapped twice around my neck
like I was trying to hang myself
before I even took a breath.
That should have been the first clue.
My cells know how to multiply in the dark.
My blood knows how to clot around betrayal.
My bones? They've broken and reset so many times
they're more callus than calcium,
more scar than structure.
I am built from the architecture of aftermath.
They keep trying to drown me—
those small people with their small cruelties,
their gossip like stones in pockets,
their judgment like rope.
But here's what they don't know:
I have gills they can't see.
I breathe in rooms with no oxygen.
I photosynthesize shame into strength.
Some people inherit money.
Some people inherit good bone structure.
I inherited the ability to not die
when dying would be easier.
I inherited my grandmother's jaw—
set like concrete, like a door that only opens from the inside.
I inherited my mother's hands—
always doing, always making, always building something
from the rubble of whatever just exploded.
I inherited my father's stubbornness—
that refusal to quit even when quitting is the rational choice.
I am a cocktail of resilience and rage,
mixed with a twist of watch me.
They want me soft.
They want me grateful.
They want me to say thank you
for the bare minimum of human decency,
to perform gratitude for being abandoned
at the exact moment I needed someone to stay.
But I am done shrinking.
Done apologizing for taking up space.
Done pretending their comfort
is more important than my truth.
I have been polite through my own crucifixion.
I have said please and thank you
to people nailing my hands to wood.
I have smiled with blood in my teeth.
No more.
This year, I am the flood.
This year, I am the forest fire that clears the dead wood.
This year, I am the earthquake that reminds you
the ground was never as solid as you thought.
I am leaving people in the past
like snake skin,
like old names,
like versions of myself that believed
I needed anyone's permission to exist.
And to those who showed their true faces
while my father was dying,
who chose cruelty when they could have chosen silence,
who weaponized my grief for their own small purposes—
The universe is keeping receipts.
Karma doesn't forget.
And neither do I.
But this isn't about them.
This is about me.
About the woman I'm becoming
in the margins of catastrophe,
in the spaces between heartbeats,
in the quiet morning hours when I decide,
again,
to live.
Not just exist.
Not just endure.
But live.
To plant flowers in my own ruins.
To build cathedrals from my broken parts.
To alchemize every betrayal into something
that looks suspiciously like power.
I am my own religion now.
I worship at the altar of my own becoming.
I pray to the god of my own survival.
I genuflect to no one.
So here I am:
unkillable thing,
ungovernable woman,
unbreakable force of nature
disguised as soft thing.
They keep mistaking me for a victim.
They keep forgetting I have teeth.
Watch me grow.
Watch me rise.
Watch me turn their poison into fertilizer
and bloom anyway.
Watch me survive
because survival isn't my talent—
it's my entire fucking biology.
And baby,
business is good.
-Artwork created in Photoshop and additional image-painting programs
-Poetry written by me
-both copyright to ©Stacy Stephens