Paper Dolls

They taught us to trace ourselves in pencil first

light, erasable,

neat around the edges.

Said womanhood was symmetry,

that love lived in the spaces we carved away.

So we learned how to fold

how to disappear beautifully,

how to curve only where allowed.

Paper women.

Paper dreams.

Paper-thin confidence

pressed between glossy magazine covers.

But some of us

we were born with too much gravity.

Too much music in our walk,

too much sun in our skin,

too much holy in our hips.

We tore the outline on purpose.

Let the edges fray.

Let the ink bleed.

Let the story breathe.

Now, when they ask what happened

to the cutout girl,

I tell them

she lived.

She unfolded.

She learned that softness is strength

and flesh is a form of praise.

We are not paper.

We are pulp turned poem,

bodies stitched from thunder and honey,

pages that refuse to stay flat.