I built courts inside my mind

Judged myself for forty different crimes

I was hanged, I was burned, I was bound

I was a witch in Salem,

a heretic in Florence,

I was Joseph the dreamer in the deep well,

betrayed and swallowed by silence.

I hid in shadows, beneath the trees

like Antigone with flowers on my lips,

I was caught — unjust, they said.

I believed but their smiling faces were blinding illusions

just like the ones I saw in the mirrors.

And then I realized —

I wasn’t just guilty,

I was also the evidence

dangling slowly on the gallows I built for myself.

A fading ghost in silence,

but no one ever searched for me.

They dressed my silence in white linen,

pinned diagnosis to my name.

“Hysteria,” they whispered — such a feminine shame.

I became a museum of sorrow,

exhibited behind the glass of their shameful stares.

Even my breath was archived,

labeled as a problem —

how clinical their fascination,

how tender their knives.

I was Sappho on the cliff,

I was Joan in the fire,

I was Medea, misunderstood, monstrous 

burning not with hate, 

but grief too wide for the world.

Tell them, if they ask,

that I was all of them.

And none.