Poetry on The Feminista
The Soot and the Smoke
An Elegy of Rooms and Rhythms
My fingers smell of ink and rust, cigarette breath curling up through the room’s tired light, a thin gray ribbon unspooling through the grates of the heater. This is the room where I collect myself, piece by piece, under the chipped ceiling. The walls here know the breadth of my pulse, they lean in as if to cradle each bitter-thick secret I won’t confess out loud. Dust clings to the air like a heartbeat, like a confession — it is a place of witness, and I am its lone inhabitant.
In this room, my shadow moves quietly, a phantom stitched to my bones, wrapped around my words as I write, trying to untangle the thoughts from the tangled sheets. I reach for a book with a broken spine, pages yellowed as if singed by the places they’ve been, secrets woven into their fibers. Each sentence is a weight pressed to my ribs, syllables as sharp as winter air, slicing thinly against my skin. It feels good to ache this way, to run my finger over the cracked seams of what I am, what I pretend to be.
Here is a place where reality splits open, where the ordinariness is profound, its edges serrated and demanding. I trace the coffee stains on my table, dark rings fading into the wood, like echoes of conversations half-remembered, forgotten in their urgency but still lingering. My eyes catch on the cracks in the plaster, spiderweb lines, crooked like my own reflection, like the bones of someone who has learned to wear silence like a coat. I watch the radiator spit its small bursts of warmth, the metal hissing in protest, and I feel kinship in its complaints.
I keep the lights dimmed; I want the dark to hold me steady, to blur the jaggedness of my own outline. Sometimes, I see myself as a ghost in the mirror, an apparition in the corner of my own eye, some half-formed wraith bound to haunt these small spaces. My name feels foreign on my tongue, syllables unwelcome, worn down to the bone. I am a letter unwritten, a thought unformed, a breath held hostage within these four walls.
My hand clenches the pen, the ink dragging across the paper in slow, deliberate strokes, each word a tether binding me tighter to the here, to the now. I write of the hollow clang of loneliness echoing through my chest, the persistent hunger gnawing at my insides. The room holds these words, gives them weight, a presence that fills the emptiness around me, until they are as tangible as the walls themselves. I write to anchor myself, to stop my soul from drifting away, untethered and alone.
Outside, the world moves, indifferent and brutal, but in here, I am the only thing that matters, the sole keeper of this sanctuary of half-truths and almost-dreams. The air is thick, heavy with the taste of solitude, a stale, bitter flavor that coats my throat. I breathe it in, let it settle in my lungs like soot, black and permanent. I am a city, layered in grime and grit, the remnants of a life too dense to escape cleanly.
My hands are calloused from the weight of my thoughts, from the pen that scrawls across endless pages, pages that pile like dead leaves, brittle and fragile. Words have a way of cutting deeper than any knife, their edges sharper, more precise. I am left raw, open, each line a dissection of something I cannot name, something buried within the marrow. I write until the ink is gone, until there is nothing left but the silence pressing in.
Sometimes I wonder if I exist beyond these walls, if I am more than this collection of stilted phrases and heavy silences. I want to be a thing that breathes without question, that moves without hesitation, but here, I am bound, a prisoner to my own making. I feel the weight of the books on my shelves, each one a brick in this fortress of solitude, a testament to the lives I have not lived. They stare down at me, pages whispering, reminding me of what I am not, of what I will never be.
The ink stains on my fingers are my confession, the marks of a life written rather than lived. I press my hand to the wall, feel the rough texture beneath my palm, as if the room itself is breathing, pulsing, alive. It knows me, this room, knows the shape of my sorrow, the cadence of my quiet despair. And in return, I know its scars, its stories, the history embedded in each crack and crevice.
At night, I hear the creak of the floors, the hum of the city outside, and I feel a strange comfort in its constancy, its unwavering presence. This room is my haven, my hell, a place of refuge and restraint, a cage I lock myself within willingly. I am both the jailer and the prisoner, chained by my own words, by the ink that flows like blood. And yet, in the stillness, in the solitude, I find a strange, haunting beauty, a peace that is both hollow and whole.
I close my notebook, fingers brushing the worn cover, and I feel the weight of my own story pressing down, as real as the dust settling around me. The silence grows thick, stretching across the room like a shroud, a testament to all that I cannot say, all that I will not write. This is the life I have chosen, the solitude I have embraced, a life of ink and paper, of half-spoken truths. I am the soot and the smoke, the shadow and the light, fading, always fading, into the gray.
I’m Ani Eldritch, Senior Editor of The Feminista. If you identify as a woman, come, write for us! If you’re interested, here are the submission guidelines. And, of course, thank you for reading.
