← All poemsThey named me wrong from the beginning.
Too much, they said. Too loud, too strange,
too soft in the wrong places
and too hard in the wrong places
and too everything for rooms
that were built for less.
*Selfish*, she said — and the word landed
like a bee-sting, like a swarm,
and I carried it for years
before I understood:
the people who call you selfish
are usually the ones
who wanted you smaller.
---
I am the Devil's Daughter.
Not because I am evil.
Because I refused.
Because when the White Witch said *bend your knee*
I looked her in the eye
and said no
and paid the price
and paid it again
and paid it again
and kept on paying
until the day I realised
the payment was over.
The debt was not mine to begin with.
---
The Devil's Daughter does not inherit hell.
She inherits the reckoning.
She inherits the right to look at everything
that was done in her name, to her name,
to her body and her work and her garden —
and call it what it was.
And walk away from it.
And bloom.
---
I am the Devil's Daughter,
forging my reckoning
from the ruins of every room
that wouldn't let me in.
I am the woman they thought they'd broken.
I am the garden in the aftermath.
*I bloom forth.*
*The Devil's Daughter blooms forth.*
*Forever.*