I Am a Wild Woman I was not tamed. I was interrupted, and I came back anyway. Age does not fade me. It leaves its fingerprints on me, each year making me more unmistakably me. I birthed children from my body and created worlds with my bare hands. Before either had a name, they ran through my veins. There is earth under my nails and earth in my bones. I am not separate from the ground I walk on. Its minerals are in my teeth, its salt moves through my blood, its memory written on my skin. The wind knows my name. After all these years, I know when to listen. Every woman who has ever swallowed her voice, who ever turned toward her own life when the world had mapped out another one, lives somewhere in my chest. As I live in hers. We are not many wolves. We are one howl wearing a thousand bodies. My heart gives orders. I obey no one else's. There are nights when dancing becomes its own language, when the body remembers something the mind was taught to forget. No one gets to make a home out of my silence anymore. This Earth owes me nothing. Still, she feeds me, holds me, buries what is finished and grows something from it. So do I. What tried to silence me became a voice. What tried to bury me became ground beneath my feet. What interrupted me did not end me. I came back louder, grew whole in my own hands, and claimed every part of me. Wise enough to know my own voice. Wild enough to follow it. I am a Wild Woman. I AM A WILD WOMAN.