Inheritance Theory
Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
I keep writing about roots
as if naming them will make them kind.
As if I could rewrite the soil
by rearranging the syllables.
But I want to stop.
I want to stop tracing the bruise back to its beginning.
I want to stop building shrines
to pain that mistook itself for love.
I want to stop pretending
that healing is just another word for survival.
I want to be someone else,
somewhere else,
something else.
I want to forget the geography of that house—
the rooms where I learned
to shrink politely.
I miss the sunlight that loved me
without asking for silence in return.
We almost made it, didn’t we?
That’s what hurts the most—
the almost.
The brief illusion of breakthrough
before you folded back into your ruin.
You are a masterpiece of undoing,
and I am tired of being your canvas.
I no longer care why you are broken.
The why has nothing left to teach me.
All that matters now
is the slow reconstruction—
the gathering of limbs,
the reassembly of a life that still insists
on breathing.
They say the broken places make you stronger.
But I’ve examined the evidence—
and I am only sadder,
shinier in the light perhaps,
but no stronger.
Gold doesn’t make the fracture noble.
It only makes it visible.
Legacy is the cruelest inheritance:
you inherit the pain
and none of the privilege,
their sickness but not the excuse.
You spend a lifetime
cleaning up bloodlines
that will never thank you for it.
Still—
I keep mending.
Not because it makes me stronger,
but because I refuse to stay the way
you left me.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe
