I am not what they call me. Labels are just the crust of a bread I do not wish to eat. I am a state of being, a pulse, a vibration in the dark. I am the “it” that breathes before the word is born.

To be a poetess is not to tell stories, it is to suffer the impact of the world against the skin. I am the silence that waits. Not the empty silence, but the thick, humid silence that precedes the scream. I do not want to be a masterpiece; I want to be the raw paint, wet and smelling of earth, refusing to dry.

Look at me. No, do not look at me, look at the space I occupy. I am the fever in the eye that sees too much. I am a creature of the instant. I do not “seek” magic, I am the collision of the mundane with the infinite, a wild thing caught in the trap of a sentence.

I am not a woman, not a man, not a person. I am a thing that feels. My words are not ink; they are my very guts spilled onto the floor, still warm, still pulsing. I am a mystery to myself, a labyrinth where I am both the monster and the thread.

I do not explain. I simply am. And in the terrifying freedom of my words, you will not find who I am, you will find the echo of your own existence, gasping for air.

©️ Beatriz Esmer