Poetry by Esther Claus I refuse to sit in stories that broke me, to hold up pain like it still owns me. I will not place the past before my feet, those old ghosts of shame, anger and defeat. I refuse to be a prisoner of someone else’s harm. I refuse to let my story be shaped by their sin. I am not what happened to me. I am what I chose to become. But the body remembers what the mind cannot bear, the subconscious whispers what the voice cannot share. There was no way I
