cynthia loves poetry

Sometimes words fail us. Regular writing—you know, the kind with nice neat sentences all lined up in tidy rows—just can’t capture how trauma actually feels. How it fragments everything. How it makes time skip and stutter like a scratched record.

(And don’t even get me started on trying to explain it to therapists.)

But poetry? Poetry gets it. Poetry knows how to speak in silences, in broken lines, in all the spaces between what we can and can’t say out loud.

Take my poem “Sister lost.” When I write:

She was
                    so easy 
                                        to forget.

Notice those breaks between the lines? They’re doing as much work as the words. Maybe more. They’re speaking in the language of empty spaces, of memories that refuse to stay whole, of all the things we can’t quite remember—or can’t bear to remember.

The white space around those words isn’t just empty paper. It’s all the silence that comes after someone vanishes. It’s all the questions we don’t ask. It’s all the answers we will never get.

When Silence Screams
Sometimes it’s the spaces between words that scream the loudest. Like all those schoolday mornings where only two lunches were ready to carry to school. Two. Not three. Or how we learned to tiptoe around certain topics, certain memories, certain names.

In “Sister lost,” even the physical shape of the poem speaks to this:

Abandoned in the darkness
of the basement
          urine-stained mattress
          tossed on the floor
                              near 
shelves filled with dust-covered jars—
grandma’s home-canned
blueberries, green beans, raspberry jam.

See how the words tumble down the page? How they create their own dark spaces? That’s not just formatting—that’s the shape of memory when it’s trying to both remember and forget at the same time.

Time Isn’t Always a Straight Line
Those loud spaces between the words…like all those family dinners where we carefully didn’t mention the empty chair. Or how we learned to tiptoe around certain topics, certain memories, certain names.

Trauma has its own calendar, its own clock. Yesterday might feel like tomorrow, while twenty years ago could be happening right now. Poetry gets this. It doesn’t force us to write in straight lines or neat chronological order.

In “Another black hole,” I explore this warped sense of time:

Where did Mother say 
	she was going?
I thought she said 
	she was going to a hospital
	she said to have a surgery
for something in her belly?
	she said…
it was… was it… 	
I think it was a hernia?

didn’t she say that?

she said not to worry
	though, and so I haven’t.

The way the questions circle back, the way memory tries to make sense of what happened—this is how trauma time works. Not in a neat line from A to B, but in spirals and loops and sudden drops into darkness.

Finding Words for the Unspeakable
Sometimes the only way to tell a hard truth is to come at it sideways. Poetry gives us permission to do this. It lets us use metaphor when literal language fails us. It allows us to break rules when the rules aren’t serving the truth we need to tell.

Sometimes it means
             letting the words scatter across the page like shattered glass 
Sometimes it means 
             letting silence do the heavy lifting
Sometimes it means
             trusting that what isn't said is just as important as what is

Because in the end, that’s what poetry does best—it gives us a language for the unspeakable. It creates a space where trauma can speak in its own tongue, where memory can move at its own pace, where healing doesn’t have to follow anyone else’s timeline.

I write poetry because sometimes it’s the only way to tell these stories. When regular sentences won’t do, when memories refuse to line up in neat paragraphs, poetry steps in and says “It’s okay. Break the rules. Leave spaces. Let silence speak.”

Because here’s the thing about trauma—it doesn’t just live in the words we manage to say. It lives in the hesitations. In the pauses. In all those spaces between what we can and can’t bring ourselves to write down. (In the empty chair at the breakfast table. In the questions we still can’t ask. In the answers we’re still waiting for—and will never get.)

But poetry? Poetry knows how to hold all of it. The spoken and unspoken. The remembered and forgotten. The past that won’t stay past and the present that keeps skipping like an old scratched record.

And sometimes, in those spaces between the lines, in those carefully crafted silences, we find something that feels a lot like healing.