Tattoo reads, “When words become inadequate, I shall be content with silence”.

There are words waiting: a poem

My fingers, pink side up

Hold stories made of gestures, 

Signs and twirls.

The whorls 

Of each fingerprint start a chapter, a Sign Language tale.

Violence made me mute when I was younger;

It still returns as an adult - the silence

I surrender

To a fractured part inside my soul.

Another name, another author

Of my life takes hold.

And when I stare at my palms, the lines,

So fractured, divides

Into several paths, many lives

I have carried:

A library of personalities tallied.

My fingers move, my body remembers

Trees towering above me

And a book burning

As another part of me rises from the embers.