12/22/2025
Shh
I don’t arrive standing.
I arrive as Magdalena did—
after the weeping,
after the labor of holding others together,
after the long misunderstanding
of what devotion costs a woman.
My body reminds me.
One leg speaking,
and the rest has followed.
I lie here,
not in surrender.
I lie here in refusal.
I refuse to keep standing
for what no longer asks my consent.
I’ve already taken a bite.
Done.
Not from hunger.
From knowing.
Lilith knows this gesture—
the choosing of the body over the story,
the story that demanded kneeling,
the story that mistook endurance for love.
She knows the audacity of rest.
She knows the holiness of appetite.
So do I.
See who has come to witness
my refusal—
and my rising.
Red caps emerging from the decay.
Roots tangling without apology.
Eyes everywhere—
not to judge,
but to remember what I have survived
and recognize what I no longer carry.
To find me, look closely,
but I am not hiding.
I am being held.
The earth holds me
without asking
what I will give back.
This is not sleep.
This is the hour after exile.
This is me reclaiming my name.
I have been mothered by duty.
Spent by loyalty.
Used by love
that only knew how to take.
My body has always been speaking,
but I asked it to believe the stories with me.
Now the medicine heals
because the medicine listens.
I will no longer offer myself
as cure.
No more arranging my worth
around usefulness.
I speak,
and the body answers.
shh.
Vpoetry
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Art: In the Garden of Disarrayed Bliss
Ishna Muceros
Acrylic on Canvas
Ishna paints women not as subjects, but as worlds. Her figures embody the archetypal feminine—sovereign, instinctive, and mythic.
In this painting, Ishna renders the feminine not as a figure to be viewed, but as a terrain to be entered. The woman reclines into a living field of mycelium, roots, eyes, and rare white strawberries—symbols of nourishment, memory, and appetite quietly reclaimed. Her body rests against a red-capped agaricus mushroom, evoking medicine that emerges from decay and heals through attunement rather than intervention.
Threads trail loosely from her form, suggesting former bindings released without struggle. The surrounding eyes do not surveil or judge; they witness. Botanical and animal forms interweave with pattern and color, creating a psychic ecology where rest is not collapse but sovereignty, and stillness becomes an act of refusal against extraction. This work marks a threshold moment—the feminine after endurance—held by the earth itself, listening inward, no longer arranging her worth around what she can give.
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Reflection
This painting isn’t asking you to understand it. It’s asking you to rest long enough to recognize yourself.
The woman is not lying down because she is tired—though she may be. She is lying down because she no longer consents to standing for what asked too much of her. That is not collapse. It is clarity.
Notice how gently the body has made its decision. No argument. No announcement. Just a quiet return to the ground—to what can actually hold her. The earth beneath her is alive with root, soil, and mushroom, and it does not demand improvement. It does not ask what she will give back. It simply receives her.
The medicine beneath her is not here to fix anything. It heals because it listens to what the body has been saying beneath the stories it was asked to live. It works only because the body has stopped holding itself together, and she has stopped negotiating her worth.
The sweetness in this image is subtle—white strawberries, not red. Desire without performance. Nourishment taken because it is needed, not because it is offered. This is appetite returned to its rightful owner.
There are eyes everywhere, but they do not judge. They are not there to evaluate or correct. They remember what has been carried. They recognize what has finally been set down. Nothing here needs to be proven.
The poem speaks from that exact moment—the hour after endurance ends and before a new story rushes in to replace the old one. It names refusal not as bitterness, but as care for the body. It names rising not as triumph, but as what happens naturally when kneeling stops.
If this work meets you, it may be because you, too, have lived inside devotion long enough to feel its cost. Because you have been strong in ways that were necessary once, but are no longer required. Because something in you knows it is time to be held—without explanation.
There is nothing here you have to do.
Nothing to become.
Nothing to give.
Only a quiet permission to stop arranging your life around usefulness and to listen for what your body has been saying all along.
The final word is not instruction.
It is care.
“shh.”
