The Quiet Ones
Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe
Out there,
I am small.
I am the soft voice at the edge of the room,
the polite smile that smooths over discomfort.
I am the second thought,
the seat-taker,
the body before the name.
Out there,
I am the fair one,
the weaker vessel,
the sigh of compliance.
They call it grace.
They call it femininity.
They call it everything but survival.
They mistake silence for peace,
and gentleness for absence.
They do not see the way I bite my tongue
to keep from flooding the room.
They do not know what it costs
to keep the dam intact.
Because inside,
I am water with teeth.
A current carved from centuries.
A river swollen with all the women
who learned to rage quietly.
Inside,
I am thunder trying to behave.
I am a fault line in a floral dress,
a scream wearing lipstick.
Every heartbeat is an uprising
I’ve been told to keep to myself.
And still—
their version of me
rings louder than my own voice.
Their idea of who I am
echoes through rooms I’ve never entered,
drowns out the river I’ve spent a lifetime becoming.
How can their fiction
outweigh my flesh?
How can their noise
erase my song?
This is the wound of being a woman—
to live in constant translation,
to be rewritten by every gaze that lands too long.
To know yourself as infinite
and still be told you are decoration.
They call me delicate,
and I almost laugh—
because if softness were weakness,
the world would have collapsed
the first time a woman wept.
I am not small.
I am only folded,
tucked into a shape the world can stand to look at.
But even origami remembers the storm
that soaked the paper first.
One day,
I will stop holding the river back.
And when I do,
they will call it disaster.
But it will only be freedom—
a quiet woman
finally letting herself be loud.
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Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
