The poem about love that left us gasping for air

There is nothing more beautiful than a man’s strength. There is also nothing more terrifying

There is nothing more beautiful than a man’s strength. There is also nothing more terrifying

SEWN SHUT

By Lauren Eden

This time I use blue.

Stitching my bottom lip to my top lip

closed. A shut door.

Two days ago, it was yellow.

I’m long out of yellow.

I tally the thread under my pillow.

These are the times you swallowed your voice.

The number is too much.

Peace comes to those when you’re quiet.

Not who is quiet.

You say I fight too much.

You think it’s a character flaw.

It was my survival instinct.

I have a purple heart.

I bite down.

Put aprons on my soldiers.

Watch them nag like housewives.

Get out my own gun. Shoot them dead. Sniped

before detected by your sight.

I want you quiet, so I stay quiet.

Tangle the next thread around my

pinky finger, the way I’m wrapped around yours.

When you love someone, you blindly love.

Even in the dark. Even when you’re scared.

Even when the shadows merge into inkblots

stamped out of words.

When you shout, I stare at your teeth.

Reminded how all the men I’ve loved

have been the same:

White. Straight. Sharp. Pulverising.

I sit small on the couch and watch you flare.

Colour out of my face.

Quiet as bone.

See what we mean?

Here Lauren, in her own words, breaks down the inspiration for her work:

A woman’s voice is like a silk scarf being pulled from a magician’s mouth.

It might look easy.

But what the audience doesn’t see is the years of practice it has taken for it to look seamless.

Generations, in fact.

A time before your time.

Women may now have their names printed on the spines of books, but the damage done collectively is still felt and echoed in the troubled dynamic between men and women, and most of this is set and begins in the home.

There is nothing more beautiful than a man’s strength. There is also nothing more terrifying.

A lion will never know what it’s like to be a deer in a world where simply opening its mouth to speak is an act of courage, and sometimes, a dangerous one.

We might celebrate a woman when she speaks in defiance and with truth, but we don’t acknowledge all those times she has opened her mouth to speak, eyes wide in the headlights, then, in defeat, closed it again.

This poem is about those times. When male aggression simply feels too much, too intimidating, too looming, like straight white teeth - sharp and pulverising.