The pedestal I refuse to cross

The Pedestal I Refuse to Cross is a trauma-centered poem that explores the psychological aftermath of violation through memory, embodiment, anger, and the gradual reclamation of selfhood. Rather than presenting healing as linear or forgiveness as obligatory, the poem enters the fractured interior landscape where trauma persists through the body, silence, intrusive memory, and imagined revenge. Its central metaphor – the forbidden pedestal – becomes a boundary between the survivor and the person, event, and identity that caused harm. Through images of rooms, borders, scars, architecture, and territory, the poem reframes recovery as an act of reclaiming what violence attempted to possess. Ultimately, the poem proposes poetry as a therapeutic space where memory need not disappear to lose its authority, and where survival can evolve into agency, dignity, and freedom.