There are poems that walk with their heads down, as if guilty for existing. They disguise themselves in gentle metaphors, skipping over truths with the lightness of someone afraid to trip on reality. Those don’t interest me. They’ve never spoken anything beyond silence. I prefer the ones that chew the world with sharp teeth — that explode in the mouth with the taste of ripe fruit, that grind between the molars, that leave a mark.

Good poems don’t hide. They stretch out in the heat of the day, spread across the page like languid cats, purring certainties. These are verses that glow in their own skin, that need no permission to breathe. They live intensely — and that’s why they outlive us.

Chronicles like this one wish they could be poems. They want to speak without asking for permission. Because there’s a hunger for truth that can’t be satisfied by timid words. And when a text dares to be that cat in the sun, when it purrs and scratches all at once… that’s when it truly begins to live.

©️ Beatriz Esmer