The Ones Who Rise

Little girls

don’t stay little forever.

Beautifully innocent,

dependent on a world

that rarely loves them

correctly.

They wander—

accidentally—

into the forbidden woods.

There,

they meet the big bad wolf.

They are incinerated

by his manipulations.

They face

man’s cruelest perversions,

the blackest of nightmares.

And still—

they persist.

They survive.

They learn to play with the beast,

quietly planning escapes,

embracing the darkest of nights

until even the fear of death

can no longer stop them.

They rise

to reclaim

what was stolen.

No longer silenced virgins

sewn shut by tribal demands.

No longer dolls

performing for the eyes

of men.

They become

what no one thought

would rise from ruin—

witches with starfire hands,

whores unbound and holy,

crones who carry the maps

of the underworld.

The saints.

The mothers.

The ones who run

underground railroads

and birth gods.

They grow into

gravity.

A black hole heart

at the center

of a collapsed universe—

calling others forward.

Women now,

they merge

into a new galaxy,

powerful enough

to destroy

archaic binaries.

There won’t be a fire

hot enough

to burn them,

or a stone

heavy enough

to crush them.

They are the change

the world fears.

Forged

in the most grotesque

imaginations of man,

abandoned, charred,

left alone to die—

they rise again.

Too dirty to be innocent,

too radiant to be erased.

Phoenix-born,

they are ready

to destroy

the very thing

that tried

to possess them.