Litany for the Tongue-Bitten Woman

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Truth has always tasted like ash—

dry and jagged,

hard to swallow,

slicing me open from the inside.

I open my lips to speak,

but they are sealed shut—

like an angel carved in cathedral stone:

beautiful, still,

never meant to sing hymns of praise.

Perhaps my hymns would stray from worship—

biting, not malicious,

more a landscape

of ill-kept headstones

where my anguish rests in the grave.

The priests scarred me.

God scorned me.

But the congregation—

they crucified,

with naive malice,

what was left.

An inheritance of shame—

a festering tumor of manipulation,

dressed in scripture.

They bound me

with half-truths and holy lies,

feeding my psyche

the slow drip of surrender.

I am wilting in the chapel—

a rose they forgot to tend,

punished for blooming too wide.

I’m gasping for air.

This church of life—

a mausoleum of pain.

Hearts are not meant to beat here.

I tremble beneath stone skin,

and still,

no one sees my ache.

Why is resurrection only claimed by the holy?

Why is wrath only granted to the divine?

I am a being of fire.

I seethe beneath my skin.

But they baptized me by force—

and claimed my needs crossed a line.

This is my apotheosis—

the rise they never prayed for.

I drink the ash like wine

and offer communion in my own name—

I will not lie beneath their stone.

I rise.

Now I see the world

as it truly is:

mine.