Skin That Doesn’t Know It’s Alive
whatever’s wearing this skindoesn’t blink when I do
There are some poems I write because I need to bleed.
And some I write because something in me already did.
This is one of the latter.
This one came from the cold silence that creeps in after trauma, when your body still exists—but you’re no longer sure if you do. When touch stops meaning anything. When mirrors show you faces you don’t recognize. When sensation gets rerouted like a call no one picks up.
Skin That Doesn’t Know It’s Alive
whatever’s wearing this skin
doesn’t blink when I do
⸻
Touch slid across her like fog over a corpse—
no warmth, no message, no meaning.
Just pressure she couldn’t answer,
contact she didn’t consent to remember.
She looked in the mirror and saw someone blinking—
but not breathing, not blinking like her.
Just a stranger holding her face
like a mask that didn’t quite fit anymore.
She dug her nails in to mark a border,
to see if pain would send coordinates back.
But the body delayed its response,
as if sensation needed permission to reach her.
And when someone said “you’re safe now,”
she didn’t answer—just stared through the wall.
What do you say when you’ve already left the building,
and something else locked the door behind you?
This poem lives in Section I: The Flesh Remembers What It Was Buried With —
a body-based haunting. A remembering.
Where bones carry silence.
Where skin doesn’t register kindness.
Where dissociation becomes a second skeleton.
I wrote this for the ones who didn’t get to run—
but still vanished.
For the ones who flinched at kindness
because safety never showed up without consequences.
For those who were called "cold" when they were actually just… gone.
Gone, but still breathing.
Still performing life in a body that kept answering the door long after they’d left the house.
I am not interested in writing pretty pain.
I’m interested in writing what lives inside the pain.
This poem is a map back through the fog.
Or maybe it’s just proof that I made it far enough to leave breadcrumbs.
Thank you for being here to follow them.
© 2025 Solena Vyhra. All rights reserved.
This work is part of the poetry collection The House of Collapse.
No part of this poem, including text or visual design, may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.
For inquiries, permissions, or collaborations, please contact: solenavyhra@gmail.com
Illustration and layout by Solena Vyhra.
Typography: Special Elite (poem titles), Signature (author tag).
Published on Substack via Where Silence Becomes Ritual.
