Fault Line Sovereign
by Rudraa Joshi, India. Second place in the Writory International Poetry Contest, March 2026, scored 96 out of 100.
Fault Line Sovereign I used to rent my worth by echo, Count the seconds praise would glow, Wait for rooms to tilt toward me Like flowers rehearsing loyalty. I learned to polish every edge, To bow before each borrowed pledge, To thin my voice, to trim my flame Until applause pronounced my name. Approval was a sugared vein, Sweet intravenous refrain, I called it love. I called it fate. It was a beautifully lit wait. When silence came, it did not scream. It simply cancelled every beam. No hands. No halo. No review. Just me, unclapped. Unseen. Untrue. I panicked. God, I almost begged For any gaze my pulse could peg. I would have shrunk. I would have shone. I would have traded spine for throne. But something older moved instead, Not in my pride, but lower spread, A pressure deep beneath the skin Like continents rearranging within. It was not bright. It did not blaze. It did not hunger for a gaze. It did not beg the dark to part, It widened ground beneath my heart. I felt my axis disengage From borrowed heat and rented stage, Not rising upward, thin and loud, But settling vast beneath the crowd. Aura was never mystic art. It is self-respect made visible at heart, A tectonic field, self-contained, Where presence hums, unentertained. Now when I enter any room, I do not bloom for their perfume. Some shine like fireworks, brief, undone. I move like fault lines under sun. Let rented brilliance chase the sky. Let mirrored radiance flare and die. I am not lit by being seen, I am the shift That splits the scene. -Ruvael Nyx
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