Where I Stood

Love as Habit, Woman as Wreckage.

There are poems that arrive softly, and then there are poems that sit beside the wreckage and tell the truth anyway. This piece, excerpted from my book Ghost Load Second Edition, explores the emotional weight of love when it becomes routine instead of refuge. It speaks to the ways women are taught to carry what was never theirs, the exhaustion of surviving distorted versions of love, and the quiet rebellion of refusing to remain beneath someone’s damage.

This poem lives in the tension between longing and awakening—between wanting love to feel sacred while recognizing how easily people turn each other into habits.

Nestled in the debris left underneath promise…

Lashes fall leaked in pools of tears

Jumbled between the right thing and back hand-

When handed unwanted baggage, now forced to carry as my own…

How necessary are—

Crumpled handbags and busted shoes that linger

Because they feel good…

Kind of like that of a man…

I never been much of a sucker, yet rather one that is radical about (love)

Seeming like, the definition drifts in a place of habit…

Too bad everyone adapts different “habits.”

A woman seeming the greatest definition of love,

Miss understood, I’m thinking (love)

Gotta be one of those supernatural

Experiences; kind of like a super hero children marvel after, (Love):

That of a mother who bourse children while blind…

Seeming we all can be visually impaired…

(Love) Reminding me of the tune that carried decades…

Before my record got CRACKED

Jelled in stolen kisses and false expectancies…

In limbo of reality and surrealistic pleasures…

Beating out the tempo of my destiny…

The weary bone stiffened in my back, sometimes forms its own shape.

My hips lay spared, figuring life was worth living for…(Love)

Can leave an affected woman defective…

However, my love is too unified to wring in

Soiled grime you scuffed on my floors…

I do not belong beneath soles, but rather beneath a soul-mate,

Rather not conform

To the social disasters of (Love)

But somehow rise about the possibility to eradicate

The existing reality…

Yet again, I am a mere element in someone else’s “habit.”

©2026 All Rights Reserved. Naima Yetunde Hammonds.

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If this piece found you where words have struggled to reach, sit with it awhile.

Some truths don’t arrive gently.
Some forms of love leave behind echoes, habits, bruises, and questions we spend years trying to untangle.

This poem is for the woman learning she was never meant to carry the emotional wreckage of others as proof of love. It is for those standing between survival and self-reclamation.

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