Inheritance

My father gave me his fists.

I made them into poems.

Not out of healing—

but because I needed the pain

to speak a language that wouldn’t bruise.

He didn't raise me.

He forged me.

Heat, hammer, silence.

A boy isn't born angry—

he’s taught to bite his tongue

until it bleeds truth.

The house was quiet,

but every wall remembered

where he’d been.

You could trace his rage

in cracked plaster

and the way my mother winced

at the sound of footsteps.

He said nothing.

Which is worse—

because silence doesn’t echo,

it festers.

This is what we inherit:

not just blood,

but the things we never say.

The wounds no one names,

the rules carved in glances,

the fear you learn to call normal.

And still,

when my son cries,

there is a shadow

in my reach.

My father’s hand,

inside my own.

But I stop.

And in that pause—

that trembling breath—

I bury a century of violence.

I write instead.

I stitch the ache into verses,

break the lineage

one line at a time.

This is my revolution:

I am the last mouth

that will taste this silence.