I Stayed Soft

What does it cost a woman to stay soft in a world built to break her?Tiny shards of broken mirror. Angry things that claw at ribs held together with needle and thread. Things sent to make her bitter, angry, and hard: all held at bay by a beating heart that stood at a crossroad and chose to stay soft.I Stayed Soft is a poetry collection that moves through five reckonings — Silence, Fire, Softening, Return, Becoming — tracing what it costs a woman to remain open in a world built to close her. These are poems about rage that refuses to calcify into cruelty, a body relearning comfort and pleasure after trauma, and the quiet, radical choice to stay tender when everything demands otherwise.For readers of Rupi Kaur, Nikita Gill, and Amanda Lovelace, but sharper-edged. Unafraid of the dark, or the flesh that carries us through this world.This is not a collection about surviving.It's about what you can become on the other side of survival: loving, sovereign, and in control of your fire.