There’s a quiet kind of courage in sitting with your own story. Not the polished version you post online, not the one people project onto you, but the real one. The one with the cracks, the echoes, the childhood dreams you almost forgot you had. When you decide to poeticize your narrative, you’re doing more than telling your story. You’re shaping it. Sculpting it. Breathing life into the parts of yourself that the world tried to overlook. I’ve learned that your voice is not just something you...

Some days I wake up with poems already waiting for me. Other days, I don’t feel like being a poet at all. I just want to exist, quietly. No metaphors. No crowd. Just breath. “To be or not to be” hits different when you’re from East L.A. It’s not just some Shakespearean quote, but a question that hums through the alleys, through our art and broken sidewalks. To be, means to survive, to still love after everything that’s tried to silence you. To not be… well, that’s the temptation when the...

Poetry deserves its moment of praise. The same praise as eyes locking in a crowded room. That instant when the noise fades, the world...