Poems about domestic abuse: the language for the house the world could not see.
Domestic abuse is not usually the story the movies tell. It is quieter, longer, more theological, more legal, more mundane. This is poetry for the actual thing.
What the movies get wrong.
Most cultural depictions of domestic abuse compress it into a single dramatic moment, the raised hand, the broken vase, the door slammed loud enough for the neighbors. That version exists. But it is not the version most survivors describe when they finally get room to describe it.
The version most survivors describe is a decade. It is the slow reorganization of every friendship. It is the calendar controlled by mood. It is the sentence at breakfast that meant nothing to the guest and everything to you. It is the specific way the car keys were placed on the counter. It is the years of walking through your own house on the balls of your feet.
The first fight, and the shape it set.
Almost every survivor can locate the first fight. Not the first argument, the first fight. The one where the room changed. The one after which you understood, without being told, that certain sentences were no longer allowed to leave your mouth. The poem 'The First Fight' from Letters I'll Never Send sits inside that memory. It is the beginning of the geography of your life becoming smaller.
After the first fight comes the first accommodation. You stop mentioning the friend. You stop wearing the shirt. You stop bringing up the subject. Each accommodation feels small at the time. In aggregate, they are the whole architecture of coercive control.
Why 'why didn't you just leave' is the wrong question.
It is the question survivors are asked more than any other, and it is the question that most reliably retraumatizes them. It assumes leaving is a single decision, a door you either walk through or you do not. It is not. Leaving is a hundred small decisions rehearsed for months or years, most of them in secret, most of them under conditions of danger. Leaving is often the most dangerous period of the whole relationship.
The better questions are these. What was he taking from you if you tried? Who did you have? What did the church tell you about staying? What did the court tell you about custody? What did your body know that your mouth was not allowed to say? Poems like 'Ultimatum' and 'The System Isn't Built for Me' are written from inside those questions.
The house nobody could see.
One of the loneliest features of domestic abuse is that the outside world usually saw a different house than the one you lived in. Neighbors saw the smile at the mailbox. Coworkers saw the anniversary post. The extended family saw the good parent, the good spouse, the good believer. You saw the other room. You lived in the other room.
The gap between the public house and the private house is one of the wounds. Poems like 'Vagabond' and 'Deceit' name that gap. They are the language for the reader who has been screaming inside a life that other people keep congratulating them on.
What leaving actually looks like.
Leaving is not the end. It is a middle. For many survivors the first year after leaving is harder than the last year before, because the nervous system that kept you alive inside the relationship does not immediately know the war is over. You will jump at doors. You will apologize for nothing. You will wait for the next shoe to drop, and drop, and drop, until slowly it stops dropping. The poem 'Detox' names that year.
Some poems in this list are about the leaving itself: 'The Wreckage,' 'No Contact,' 'The First Morning I Didn't Cry.' Others are about the long after , 'Learning Again,' 'Wild and Free,' 'The Quiet Came Back Slowly.' Read whichever one matches the room you are actually standing in today.
If you are still inside.
If you are reading this from inside the house the world cannot see, you are not alone. The hotline is 1-800-799-7233 in the U.S., open twenty-four hours, and they will help you build a plan whether or not you are ready to leave yet. A safety plan is not a leaving plan; it is a survival plan. You can build one before you are ready to use it.
Ten percent of every book sold funds direct services for survivors of domestic violence. The reading list below is free forever. The full collections hold the pieces that were too heavy for the free page, the specific letters, the specific prayers, the specific mornings after. They will be here when you are ready.
