Playing with Fire is a collection of poems and lyric essays exploring how language, religion, and power are forged—how certain words survive because they burn, and how others are buried because they threaten what came after.
I am not attacking belief. I am not preaching certainty. I am touching what was declared dangerous.
Playing with Fire
I was told
not to touch certain words
because they burned.
I wasn’t even told-
I felt like I was.
Policed before any police were hired.
Not because they were untrue—
but because they remembered
something older than permission.
Fire was never the problem.
Fire teaches.
It hardens clay.
It tempers metal.
It leaves marks that last.
They said belief should be cool,
contained,
approved.
But the first gods were sparks.
The first names were breath
through teeth.
I am not worshipping flames.
I am studying what survived them.
Cult
They call it a cult
when it doesn’t belong to them.
A cult is what you call
the religion you didn’t inherit.
A cult is a body gathering
without permission.
A cult is what women practiced
before it had footnotes.
A cult is what happens
before the word “religion”
learns how to dress itself
in marble.
If belief survives long enough,
it gets renamed.
If it wins,
it becomes invisible.
POEM 3 — Sacrament
They said,
this is my body
as if that were strange.
As if women hadn’t been saying it
for thousands of years.
As if eating the god
wasn’t older than the altar.
As if bread had never been sacred
before it learned Latin.
I don’t fear the ritual.
I fear who gets to keep it.
III. HYBRID PROSE-POEMS / LYRIC ESSAYS
(Perfect for journals that like “short creative nonfiction” or “poetic inquiry”)
1. Definition Drift
The word cult didn’t start cruel.
It meant care.
Tending.
Attention.
Somewhere along the way, it learned how to point.
Now it means:
not us.
not safe.
not real.
But if you follow the word backward,
it leads you to gardens,
to hands in soil,
to repetition that keeps something alive.
Language doesn’t forget.
It just gets trained.
2. On Winning
A belief becomes respectable
when it survives.
That’s the rule we never write down.
History does not crown the truest story.
It crowns the one that lasted long enough
to call the others dangerous.
If Christianity had lost,
it would be studied like a warning.
Instead, it became the measuring stick.
And we forgot to ask
who carved the ruler.
3. Ash
There is a sound
older than doctrine.
Ash.
Ish.
Is.
It shows up where fire meets breath.
Where something becomes something else.
I don’t need proof
that it’s related.
I just need to notice
that it never disappears.
Some sounds are too useful to kill.
They just change names.
IV. HOW TO USE THIS (VERY PRACTICAL)
1. Poetry Awards & Journals
You can submit:
individual poems (1–3 at a time)
or a mini-sequence under Playing with Fire
Good fits:
poetry journals open to myth, religion, feminism, history
interdisciplinary or “experimental lyric” venues
contests that welcome voice-driven work
Tip:
Use a neutral bio:
“My work explores language, belief, and how cultural memory survives suppression.”
No need to explain more.
2. Substack / Medium Integration
You can:
post one poem at the top
follow with a short reflection (4–6 paragraphs)
never explain the poem fully
Example structure:
poem
pause
“Here’s the question that led me here…”
This keeps poetry and essays feeding each other.
The Collection
PLAYING WITH FIRE
Words That Burn
Cults and Survivors
Bread, Body, Ash
What Won
After the Fire
Before the rule was written,
my body already knew
where not to go.
No warning signs.
No fence.
Just the quiet understanding
that some questions
were above my pay grade,
and some fires
were not meant to be touched
by hands like mine.
No one said no.
No one had to.
The walls were already standing
inside me.
That’s how the system works best:
when it doesn’t have to speak.
The rule arrived as instinct.
As caution.
As a hand on the shoulder
that never touched me.
That’s how you know it’s old.
The oldest laws
don’t need enforcement.
They live in the body.
Glimpses, almost imperceptible
yet perceived and internalized by every child.
It was once forbidden.
But is not anymore.
—-
The oldest laws don’t need enforcement.
They live in the body.
Glimpses—
almost imperceptible,
yet absorbed
by every child.
Once forbidden.
Felt,
before it was named.
And now,
no longer banned—
only remembered
as instinct.
—-
The oldest laws don’t need enforcement.
They live in the body.
Passed on in glances,
in pauses,
in what tightens the chest
before the thought arrives.
Every child learns them.
No announcement required.
It was once forbidden.
Not by decree—
by feeling.
Now it isn’t.
And still,
the body hesitates.
—-
The oldest laws don’t need enforcement.
They live in the body.
Learned through glimpses—
so small they seem harmless,
yet precise enough
to stay.
Every child receives them.
It was once forbidden.
And then,
quietly,
it wasn’t.
It isn’t.
But the body remembers
longer than the rule.