There Is No Wrong Way to Tell the Truth

Let them come for you—
with their red pens and revisionist eyes,
with their insidious longing
to sand down your sharp edges,
to bleach your voice
until it fits the sterile mouth
of a quieter woman.

Let them tell you
that your pain is impolite,
your recollection inaccurate,
your fury unbecoming
of a daughter, a partner, a survivor,
a woman who dares to speak
in something louder than apology.

But here is the marrow of it all:
there is no wrong way
to exhume what was buried.
No incorrect syntax
for screaming the unsayable.
No grammatical sin
in stuttering your way
through a storm
no one else lived through.

You may tell the truth
with a whisper
or a war cry.
In ink or blood.
In courtroom testimony
or graffiti on a bathroom stall.
You may spit it from the wound
before it festers,
or cradle it for years
until it ripens
into a story you can finally survive.

Tell it through poetry
that dances on the bones
of what they broke.
Tell it with silence
that deafens every room.
Tell it with shaky hands,
with bad lighting,
with cracked breath and typos—
truth is not a thesis.
It is a resurrection.

Do not let them dictate
the choreography of your becoming.
You are not an unreliable narrator.
You are the archivist
of everything they tried to erase.
The scripture
they cannot rewrite.
The cathedral
they cannot raze.

So tell it.
Even if your voice trembles.
Even if it comes out crooked,
smeared, slanted,
like lipstick on a tear-streaked face.
Tell it how it happened—
or how it felt.
Tell it loud.
Tell it wrong.
Tell it real.

There is no wrong way
to tell the truth.
There is only the miracle
of telling it at all.