My Words Are Whiskey

You tell me my words are whiskey, burning at the corners of your eyes and searing your throat on the way down, heat rising.

I ask you what you expected of a woman Tennessee-raised with whiskey-fire in her blood.

You keep asking for me to be less, to feel less, to honey-coat each phrase that leaves my parted lips.

I tell you to find another writer, one whose words are a pearlescent gloss coat that won’t strip paint from the walls of the room you fabricated.

My words are strong, grit-filled and smoking. I cannot make them less because you don’t like the way the fire casts your features into sharp relief or the way your clothes reek of smoke when you walk away.

I cannot make them less because the flame in me hurts even as it heals.

I was fire when I came screaming into the world, and maybe I’ll go out of it bleeding ink, words whisper-scrawled across a page to tell you who I was.

You want to put a hand over my mouth, pull a scarf tight around it, cut off my words before they can take any more prisoners. As if my words ever took prisoners to begin with.

And I am standing here, bleeding love and ink, all the while you try to tell me that I am too much, too much, too much. And how can anyone love me when I am too strong to do anything but stand immovable or break?

I tell you I am strong like trees bending through the storms and surviving. Rooted. Grounded.

I see the glint in your eye, how it matches the glint on the sharp end of the ax you carry.

You want to cut me down to less.

You forget that I am the handle of the ax you carry.

That I am the flame of the fire you’re stoking to burn me,

That I have been chopped down before and burned to ash and have risen stronger.

You take a shot of whiskey and look me in the eyes. You tell me that I’m the whiskey and the fire and the tree and the storm. How can any woman be all of that and survive it?

And I ask you what you expected of a woman Tennessee-raised with whiskey-fire in her blood, grit in her words, and ink in her soul.

If you want a glossy coat of paint and a painted smile, find yourself another writer.