Poem: Who Knows

Reading Time: < 1 minuteA short poem: Who Knows, on uncertainty, the sea, and the particular freedom that comes from letting the question remain open. Written from a moment of stillness beside the water in Loreto.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

“I am still here, even when my body expects me to disappear.”

I did not
mean to exist
so loudly.

You did
Say I made it up,
the way the floor creaked,
The glass shattered,
The night bent sideways.

Title: Fractured Evidence

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Sea glass gathered from low tide: fragments shaped by impact, time, and dispute.

Who knows
what happened
when the truth
Became optional?

I remembered.
You rewrote.
The story shifted,
word by word,
until even silence
sounded suspicious.

Who knows
which silence
screamed first?

Title: The Shadow Wears My Shoes (I am still here)

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Notation: I included this image to remind myself that I am still here, even when my nervous system expects otherwise.

Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.

Key Concepts

Alonetude (Tucker, 2026): A positive, intentional relationship with being alone: full presence to oneself without performance, audience, or apology. Distinct from loneliness or solitude.
Somatic Knowledge (Levine, 1997; van der Kolk, 2014): Knowledge held in the body: sensory, felt, and pre-verbal. The nervous system as a site of meaning-making and memory.
Slow Violence (Nixon, 2011): Gradual, dispersed harm that unfolds over time and space, often invisible because it lacks spectacle. Used here to describe institutional and ecological erosion.
Institutional Gaslighting (Tucker, 2026): Systematic denial, minimization, or reframing of a person's experience by an institution, causing them to doubt their own perception of reality.
Institutional Violence (Galtung, 1969): Harm produced through institutional structures, policies, and cultures, rather than by individual actors. Often normalized and difficult to name.
Third Shore (Tucker, 2026): A liminal space between departure and arrival: the threshold where old identity dissolves and new inquiry begins. Both a literal place (the Sea of Cortez) and an epistemic condition.
Positionality: The researcher's location within social, historical, and institutional structures. How one's standpoint shapes what is seen, what is asked, and what is possible to know.
Ambiguous Loss (Boss, 1999): Loss without closure: the grief of leaving something that was both sustaining and harmful, where mourning has no clear object or endpoint.

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