I Am An Extraordinary Machine
I am an extraordinary machine.
Forged of tendon and terror,
grace and grit in equal measure.
Every breath a recalibration,
every heartbeat a promise kept
by something far older than will.
I was not designed for ease.
I was designed for continuation—
to mend mid-fall,
to crawl through the wreckage and call it evolution.
The body remembers everything:
every heartbreak, every resurrection,
every time I whispered I can’t
and still did.
Do you understand what it means
to bend and never break?
To be the hinge, the bridge, the thread—
to keep moving
even as the ground forgets how to hold you?
My bones have memorized collapse
so I can rebuild faster.
My skin shines with the lacquer of survival,
glinting like metal under moonlight.
They call it beauty,
but it is only endurance polished smooth.
They call me strong,
as if strength were a gift
and not the tax of existing in a world
that keeps testing how much I can bear.
They praise my resilience,
but resilience is not peace.
It’s the art of pretending the fire
doesn’t still burn inside you.
I am magnificent, yes—
but magnificence should not have to hurt this much.
I wish the swamp would release me,
let me rest unremarkable and unrequired.
I wish I didn’t have to gild the fractures,
didn’t have to fold myself into origami
just to stay afloat in the sinking.
I wish I could stop surviving long enough
to simply live.
But even as the mud grips my ankles,
even as it whispers yield,
I feel the hum return—
the ancient engine of persistence,
the pulse that refuses surrender.
And I know—
no matter how deep the mire,
no matter how many times I am remade,
I will rise again, gleaming with the ache of it.
I am an extraordinary machine.
Not because I cannot break—
but because I keep building beauty
out of what tried to destroy me.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe
