My Clothes Say I’m Not

I’m becoming the woman they swore I could never be, soft where I choose, steel where I need.

My voice don’t beg for space anymore, it take it, steady like bassline in a dancehall tune, quiet but felt in every rib.

They look at me and see the clothes first, button-down sharp, shoes firm on concrete, silhouette carved a little different from what they expect softness to look like.

And so they decide: “She can’t be that woman.”

But they don’t see how my hands know gentleness, how my love speaks in warm tones, how I carry tenderness like it’s stitched beneath my skin.

They don’t hear how I laugh, full, bright, like sunlight bouncing off zinc fence.

They don’t know femininity don’t live in fabric, don’t beg permission from lace or length.

It lives in me.

In the way I nurture, in the way I stand, in the way I choose myself over and over again.

I am not confusing. I am not halfway. I am not contradiction.

I am expansion.

A woman.. Becoming louder in her truth, softer in her knowing, unapologetic in her form.

My clothes might speak a language they understand, but my spirit?

It writes its own.