We hold our place in lines and waiting rooms.
Below, the shifting geology of wounds.
No one’s aware of what the body bears—
The hairline cracks, the jaw clenched on its prayers.

The body remembers all the little deaths—
The flinch before the shadow. The held breaths.
Trauma doesn’t live in what we say—
It lives in how we brace against the day.

We walk with more than what a life accrues.
We carry hand-me-down grief, inherited blues.
The dead still move in us—their clenched jaw, their gait—
Their unfinished sorrow, our embedded trait.

My ulcer holds the argument I swallowed.
My spine still bows toward masters I followed.
Disease is not invasion—it’s the body’s voice,
Saying what I couldn’t when I had no choice.

There are fissures within me where my ancestors meet.
Their arguments echo. Their losses repeat.
The dead don’t ask permission to remain—
They burrow into marrow, into brain.

We find each other not by joy but scars—
The ever-present bruise, invisible bars.
No need to explain what the body has known.
We see our kind by how they hold their own.

The wound doesn’t vanish. It just grows quiet.
The body stops bracing for the next riot.
Healing isn’t ignoring the constant ache—
It’s when the jaw unclenches for its own sake.

You don’t get fixed. You just get more aware,
You learn the strata of the weight, how much to bear.
The cracks stay cracks. But now light passes through.
You become the window someone looks into.