Everyone struggles at some point during their lives, but often women’s struggles or experience of struggle are unique. In honour of International Women’s Day on March 8, we asked women to share their stories of both trials and triumphs. Women’s stories and experiences are valid and important. Women’s wisdom is profound and deep. Let’s honour, support, and hold each other up. Let’s celebrate women and demand gender equity.

This poem, “chapter”, is from my poetry manuscript, below the belt, and speaks to recovering after having been discarded by a life partner who decided to build a life with another woman—overlapping with ours—and neglected to tell me for six months. It was a time full of shock and … awful. This poem was the beginning of going around…and back to myself…taking my power back. 

chapter

i learn you are the chapter
not the book
i write the preface foreword credits
hook laughter returns
absolves hot pain obsessing brain
surrenders search for something
that was maybe never
real reorients resets and redirects
new meaning and old friends come
into focus time’s hocus pocus
works its magic tricks no longer hunt
and seek to score romantic fix love
junkie twelve steps march
to mature love
of self
respect and honour without
you
a year ago impossible
to fathom
fresh scar a badge—still pink—marks
wound is healing your severing
now cauterised contained beginning
end no tears horizons broaden
breast swells puffs up expands with blush
enriched with promise spirit
aligns with ever holy
purpose hones link with Mother
Earth Creator stars
i shift the gears to drive
my right foot hits
the gas
what’s done is done
time to consign you
to
the past