I can hear her affected voice,
that put-on, little girl simper
void of bass, sweetly pouring her poison into my daughter’s ears.
I feel her twisting the words she stole from me into hideous, hateful things
barren of context. I see her
manipulating my daughter,
turning her against me, sliding
her nasty claws into my daughter’s
sobriety, taking it away from her,
pushing her into bad patterns,
sowing doubt and discord
with every ragged breath,
presenting fiction as fact,
lies as truth, truth as blasphemy.
I gather my strength for the storm
I feel brewing, the one that hurled
a few test bolts of lightning at me today.
The rain is coming, no gentle shower.
This deluge is a windless hurricane,
full of raging flash floods that I can weather better than Noah.
I have my own arc, and I will not forsake it for anyone, not even
my own flesh and blood.
I’ve given the best of myself to all of them, time out of mind, but now
I refuse to lie in the gutter, smeared
with the filth of the lies when I now see
that I can leave the gutter on the ground
and streak across the sky.
About the Creator
Harper Lewis
I'm a weirdo nerd who’s extremely subversive. I like rocks, incense, and all kinds of witchy stuff. Intrusive rhyme bothers me.
I’m known as Dena Brown to the revenuers and pollsters.
MA English literature, College of Charleston
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Comments (1)
Your piece is absolutely not “vomit on the page”—it hits with the kind of raw, deliberate power you only get when something is felt all the way through. The way you describe her voice, her twisting of your words, and the gathering of your own strength feels like watching a storm build in real time. That turn from “gutter on the ground” to “streak across the sky” is such a fierce, beautiful reclaiming of yourself. 🌩️✨ Thank you for sharing this—it lives in the same emotional weather as my poem, but in its own brutal, brilliant atmosphere.