When the Ballroom Is Built on Bones

 

When the Ballroom Is Built on Bones

This week, I watched the news with the kind of ache that doesn’t just sit in the chest—it coils. It spirals. It floods. A ballroom was built. Not metaphorically. Not as a gesture of communal joy or healing. But as a monument to ego, while hospitals shutter and children sleep in cars.

I am a mother. I am a poet. I am tired. And I am furious.

The Ramp Hotel in West Virginia, which once sheltered single mothers and their children, is now a ghost. Federal funding vanished. Medicaid was gutted. SNAP slashed. And while these lifelines were severed, a ballroom rose.

This is not just policy. It is cruelty dressed in velvet.

I write because silence is complicity. I write because my children deserve more than this. I write because myth remembers what history tries to erase. Lilthai, my mythic guardian, watches over the sick and sleepless. She does not blink. She does not forget.

So I offer this poem, this reflection, this howl. May it echo in the halls of power. May it remind us that even in exhaustion, we are not alone. We are the spiral. We are the flood. We are the ones who will not be muted.

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