Adena M'lynn's Voice

“The Loop”    By Adena M’lynn There’s a woman who calls me “sister” though I’ve never met her before. Says we grew up chasing fireflies and outrunning ghosts that only children could see. I nod. I don’t correct her. Maybe she remembers a better version of me than I ever lived. Alzheimer’s isn’t a thief, it’s a carousel. Each turn sends her back to the kitchen where her Mama Nell sang, then forward to a sidewalk she walked just this morning. She eats ice cream with her childhood friend and asks me if I’ve seen her today. The past and present blur like watercolor in rain— faces she half-remembers places she swears are home but don’t have doors anymore. And the words— they come like prayers, or old bruises that still ache even after forgetting how they got there. I think about the words we speak, how they hang in the air long after we’ve left the room. How a cruel sentence can ricochet decades later inside someone’s mind like a record stuck on the part of the song that cuts too d...

By Adena M’lynn They told me healing was a straight shot— but my mind’s been under construction since the first time a scream set up detour signs in my chest. See— my thoughts don’t come with warning cones. Some days the asphalt is smooth, other days it’s potholes deep enough to swallow my whole damn name. There’s a backhoe in my brain digging up memories I paved over years ago. I buried my trauma under concrete but it still finds a way to buckle the surface when the weather turns shameful. I am a one-woman work zone. Hard hat dreams and no clear exit signs. Mental illness ain’t a scenic route— it’s rerouting at midnight, it’s the GPS whispering recalculating when I swear I’ve been here before. Some mornings I am traffic backed up for miles. Some nights I am every orange barrel you cursed on the way home. I am slow down. I am wait your turn. I am don’t honk— I’m doing the best I can with these broken tools. I built detachment like an overpass, thinking it would help me get over it. But...

 by Adena M’lynn She is the keeper of secrets— not the sweet kind tucked in birthday cards or whispered before kisses, but the kind with teeth. The kind that sleep under floorboards, rattle the pipes, and fog the mirrors when she tries to see herself clearly. These are the secrets that could shatter a church, a family name, a politician’s smile. The kind shared only when someone’s zipper is down and their conscience lower. The kind exchanged like blackmail with a handshake that smells like bleach and guilt. She didn’t ask for them— they were shoved into her silence like a dirty rag in the mouth of a girl told to smile. These secrets distort her mind, twist the compass of right and wrong into a roulette wheel— spin it, pull the trigger, pray the truth doesn’t kill what little peace she’s gathered like pennies from the floor. Some days she forgets what was real and what was survival. Some nights she watches the ceiling crack under the pressure of all the names she’ll never speak. Wha...

I said it yesterday like a vow I never meant to keep— “I no longer care what people think.” And it felt like freedom, the way a falling leaf feels like flight until it hits the ground. I told myself this was power. That this was healing. That this was me, raw and roaring— the kind of unfiltered that makes poets weep and ex-lovers regret walking away. But the silence after saying it was a different kind of scream. Not defiant. Not brave. More like someone whispering into an attic box, “Please don’t look too close.” Because the truth is— maybe it’s not that I don’t care. Maybe it’s that I’ve cared so much for so long that caring became a scab I kept picking just to prove I could still feel. Maybe I’ve mistaken dissociation for self-acceptance. Like calling a shutdown an awakening. Like naming numbness “empowerment” because the opposite feels like drowning in slow motion. I am me. With every quirk that once got me bullied and every misdeed I can’t vacuum out of memory. With the timeline t...

by Adena M’lynn and the millions of other survivors of childhood sexual trauma Rape is never okay. Don’t come at me with your “But what was she wearing?” I swear on every god that’s ever grieved, the hemline of my skirt was not an invitation to your violence. Don’t come at me with “Boys will be boys” unless you’re ready to explain why your definition of boyhood includes bruises on my thighs and silence stitched into my throat. Don’t come at me with your locker room logic, your courtroom gaslight, your Bible verse bent like a noose around my body. And don’t you dare stand in a position of power— behind a podium, in a pulpit, on the marble floors of justice— while holding your penis in your hand under your desk, undressing me with the same hand that grades papers signs bills and contracts and GAG orders. You, in your tailored suit, with your    MBA, Manipulation, Bullying & Abuse  and, your handshake that feels like a trapdoor— you think power means entitlement, me...