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There is glass in my hair.
I walked through something
I do not remember breaking,
a ceiling split from beneath
like an egg confessing
the animal inside it
had grown too large
for containment.
Now I stand in the good room,
touching my face,
my wrists,
the small hinges of my hands,
checking whether I have arrived
in the correct shape.
Is this room mine?
Will they crucify me
if I speak?
Fraud. Fraud. Fraud!
I know what impostors do.
They build their altars
from borrowed shoes,
kneel before credentials
still warm from another body.
But look.
Look at your knuckles.
The powder on your sleeves.
The bright debris caught in your hair
like a hostile constellation
that followed you indoors.
The gate is behind me now.
I am in the garden,
eating the fruit
that tastes like trespass,
like punishment deferred,
and also,
remarkably,
like plum.
I am a fraud
wearing the wreckage as a crown,
a bad monarch
of one newly conquered dimension:
this cubicle,
its burning lights,
its chair designed
to outbend the spine.
Staying is the difficult physics now,
the nights,
the weekends,
the little gods of wanting
gutted quietly in the mind
so the work could continue.
This thought is a paradox
I balance on my scalp
like a terrible halo,
sharp enough to prove
I am still here.
Did I consider
the impostor must enter
before they can be accused?
That trespass
requires arrival?
I am afraid of heights
because there is finally
distance beneath me.
So I will wear the glass crown.
Just because the barrier
once accepted the shape of me,
broke,
and gave me plums.
Thank you for reading my work!
Hi, , I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself!
I am a full time writer at the moment - I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and essays or dystopias when I’m really digging into possibilities.
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Nicole, first, thank you for the mention. It means a lot me to me to be named in the opening of a piece that carries so much of you. ❤️
This feels less like a poem about impostor syndrome and more like a reckoning with what happens when the ceiling finally breaks and you discover the room was never forbidden to you. I have so loved reading Curriculum of Feelings, and this poem feels like another doorway into that same landscape, the place where we question whether we belong even after we have already arrived.
The glass crown is such a powerful image. The fragments that once told you you don’t belong here become evidence that you made it through. And that final fear of heights… perhaps that is the strangest part of becoming: not learning how to climb, but learning how to remain when there is finally nothing above you to keep you small.
And yes, perhaps the fruit tastes like plum because sometimes the things we fear we have stolen were ours to taste all along.
I absolutely love your writing. Kudos!! I send your work to my friends, and my son who is a published poet. He also admires your art.