Poetry by Amritha York

     Hefin Owen CC




admitted refusal to crumple.


i will not reside in the shadow of what you did.

i am shedding victimhood and boarding survivorship.

i will not inhabit a prison of your sycophantic touch.

watching and re-watching my soul crumple under fire.

wedged in bear traps of bite marks and drowning in old saliva. 

suffocating on putrid breath sounds of old garlic.

slipping, drowning on purple satin sheets and confusion around single sips of alcohol. 

counting each sesame seed on the dirty carpet as each moment exhausting one second after another,

floating outside my body, unable to look as my neurochemistry forever being re-wired.

i can't live in this cell of self shame and seclusion i built on blueprints of who i'm supposed to be.

i’ve run out of gauze and bandwidth to cover the blood and scars. i'm not buying long sleeve shirts anymore, i want to wear a bathing suit when i swim.

i'm turning on the light, i'm stepping into me. some one and something you never took and never had. 

i am stepping out of my self isolation tower each brick built with humiliation and repugnance.

i'm not looking away anymore, but at and through the mirror embracing me.

i'm not living in that bed full of shit or in that morning i couldn't walk, only remembering scrambled eggs in front of your mother.

living in a replayed worn tape of unbearable and unacceptable confusion and deception 

i’m tired of living in that re-aired episode of self culpability for accepting a date. playing like a bad sitcom but there was no laugh track, just your heavy breathing.

i can't live in those three seconds of concussed blackout reassurance of he didn't mean it.

i refuse to sit in that torn dress all morning unable to leave, awaiting you to give me a t-shirt. what chivalry is offering a coat to cover a ripped dress, i think.

for so long i thought you were the warden and guard, but i'm looking at an empty abandoned prison. 

so i’m letting myself out, step within step breathing crisp confident air.

sitting in the space for me with me, free for after what feels like eternity’s existence.

embracing and holding, restructuring, and reframing into who i was always meant to and going to be, a survivor.

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Amritha York is a Torontonian queer, light skinned brown, first generation immigrant, womxn.  She is a new mother to the light of her life, Akira. 

Amritha writes from a narrative perspective, often accounting first person reflections of her own life. She writes about experiences of traumas, addiction, child loss, living in poverty, and the cultural gaps of a brown person. She was forced to give up writing for two decades and only now has forced herself to find the courage to share her stories again. She hopes to push boundaries of how we use storytelling out of stuffy exclusivity into generationally healing words of comfort. Her writing is a hybrid of poetry, prose, and creative non-fiction that seeks to break traditional and conventional structures and perspectives.
She has won at regional and provincial levels for poetry with the Legion in the past and participated in Gardiner Ceramic Museum’s International Day of Violence Against Women with written prose and spoken word. More recently her work was part of a social action project for women in vulnerable situations distributed by YWCA.

Currently, she has volunteers and works as an RN in many aspects of mental health (specifically trauma, abuse, and addiction) and hopes to make poetry and writing more accessible and digestible in these spaces. She often uses art and writing in small groups to help initiate healing and promote reflection. Her background of working in the medical field and volunteering in the community influences a lot of her writing.

She hopes to empower, embolden and provide support and shine a light for others experiencing pain in the shadows in the bottom of the well.

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