My body is not a temple.

It is a map poorly drawn by fingers that didn't know the language of touch, a land traced in haste, with scars where names should have been.   There were once rivers here, but someone changed their course with promises. There were flowers here, but they learned to grow among ruins.   Wars have been fought on my skin that no one wrote down in books. I was occupied territory, an invisible boundary between desire and disappearance.   My hips are borders marked with knives, my back is a mountain range where those who flee hide, and my mouth, my mouth is a bombed-out city that still repeats the language of fire.   I was not a homeland. I was a battlefield.   And yet, every night, when silence returns like a faceless army, I recognize myself in the cracks, in the broken bridges, in the names I no longer let in.   I have made every wound a sign, every silence a warning: here there is no more conquest. This body is not explored, respected, or lost