Poetry Archives - 30 Days by the Sea

A Letter From the Woman You Are Becoming

Reading Time: 5 minutes

From Future Amy, To the Amy Who Is Almost There

Dear you.

Dear brave, brilliant, bone-tired, still-standing, still-kind, still-carrying-the-lantern you.

I am writing from the other side of everything you are in the middle of right now, from the place you cannot quite see yet because you are still in the thick of the becoming, still in the part of the story that feels more like enduring than arriving,

and I want to tell you what is here.

I want to tell you what is waiting.

First, the practical things, because I know you, I know you need to know the practical things before you can let yourself feel the rest of it.

You are okay.

Financially, professionally, in all the ways that kept you awake at two in the morning doing the mathematics of whether you would make it through another April,

you are okay.

More than okay.

You found the room that was shaped like you. I know you have been looking for it for a very long time. I know there were years you stopped believing it existed,

but it exists.

It exists, and you are in it, and it feels exactly the way you imagined it would feel on the nights you let yourself imagine.

It feels like breathing. It feels like a morning that belongs to you. It feels like walking into a room and the room saying, “There you are. We have been waiting. Come in, come in, stay as long as you like.“

The doctorate is done.

I want to tell you that because I know how it weighs on you, the unfinished thing, the work that is so important and so yours.

It is done.

And it is extraordinary.

Not because a committee said so, though they did, but because it is true. Because you wrote it in your own voice, the voice that took years to trust, the voice that is scholarly and embodied and refuses to pretend that knowing happens outside of a body, outside of a life, outside of nineteen years of labour and love and parking lot mornings.

You wrote the truest thing.

Alonetude is in the world now. People are reading it. The ones who work in the in-between spaces, the ones on the contracts, the ones performing well in the parking lots of institutions that need their labour and withhold their belonging,

they are reading your words, and they are feeling less alone, and that is the work, that is the real work, that is what nineteen years was always building toward, even when it felt like it was building toward nothing.

Now let me tell you about the things that are not practical.

Let me tell you about a Tuesday morning.

An ordinary Tuesday. Not a milestone Tuesday. Not an achievement Tuesday.

Just a Tuesday when you woke up and lay still for a moment, the way you learned to do in Loreto,

and the first thing you felt was not the tightening.

The first thing you felt was yourself.

Present. Whole. Quietly, ordinarily, unremarkably glad to be alive on a Tuesday morning with the light coming through the window and nowhere to be for another hour and a cup of something warm in your future and the work you love waiting for you like a friend rather than a demand.

You lay in it, and you thought oh. So this is what they meant.

This is what rest was building toward. This is what the shore was practicing you for. This is the life on the other side of the performance of a life.

It is quieter than you expected. It is more ordinary than you expected.

It is so much better than anything you expected.

I want to tell you about your body.

Your shoulders come down.

I know that sounds like such a small thing. It is not a small thing. Your shoulders coming down is physical evidence that a woman is no longer waiting to find out whether she is still employed.

Your shoulders coming down is what safety feels like in the body.

You are safe. I need you to hear that all the way down.

You are safe.

The students found you.

The ones who needed you specifically. The ones who were on the contracts. The ones performing fine in the parking lots. The ones who read alonetude and recognized themselves in it and needed someone who had mapped the territory and come back to say I know this place, I know how to navigate this, here is what helped, here is how you find the shore inside yourself when there is no Loreto within reach.

You became that person.

I want to tell you about the writing.

You became a poet.

And you did not even know it.

I know that surprises you. But the line between scholar and poet turned out to be much thinner than you thought, and one morning you stopped trying to categorize yourself and just wrote what the truth required,

and what the truth required, Amy, was both.

It was always both. You were always both.

Tom knows.

I want to say that because I know you worry about whether the people who love you really see the whole of it.

Tom knows.

Not because you performed it less but because you finally let yourself be known the way you always knew how to know others, fully, carefully, without looking away.

And he stayed. Of course, he stayed. He has always been staying.

You are loved. You are chosen. You are someone’s permanent.

I want to tell you what I know now that I wish you knew then, in the middle of it, in the parking lot mornings, in the two a.m. turnings:

None of it was wasted.

Not one morning. Not one contract. Not one raised bar. Not one carefully worded rejection in professional language with warmth in the room.

None of it was wasted because it all became the work.

I want to leave you with something small.

A Tuesday morning. A cup of something warm. Your shoulders are coming down. The work you love is waiting like a friend.

A smooth stone in your pocket.

The knowledge, finally unshakeable, lived in the body, permanent as the shore,

that you were always good enough.

Come forward.

I am here. I am you. I am waiting for Tuesday morning, the open window, and the work that finally looks like what you always knew it was.

Come forward.

You have already done the hardest part.

All that is left now is the living of it.

And the living of it, Amy, the living of it is so very, very beautiful.

De tu yo futuro, que te ha estado esperando con los brazos abiertos y el corazón lleno. Ya casi llegas. Sigue caminando.

From your future self, who has been waiting for you with open arms and a full heart. You are almost here. Keep walking.

Future Amy
Writer. Scholar. Poet. Whole.
Keeper of smooth stones.
Woman who came through.
Still here. Still kind. Still luminous.
Aquí estoy.

Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this letter were 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.

A Letter From the Little One

Reading Time: 4 minutes

From Five-Year-Old Amy, To the Amy She Became

Dear big Amy,

I am writing you a letter because I have something important to say and I want to make sure you hear it properly.

I am five. I know how to write some letters, but not all of them yet, so I am going to say this as carefully as I can.

I see you.

I see you being so tired and still getting up anyway, and I want you to know I think that is very brave. I get tired too sometimes, and it is hard to keep going when you are tired, and I am only five, and you have been going for so much longer than me, so I think you are the bravest person I know.

I want to tell you some things about us that I am not sure you remember anymore.

We are kind.

I know you know that, but I do not think you believe it the way I believe it, which is all the way, without any buts after it, just kind, just completely and simply kind, the way the sun is warm, not because it is trying to be but because that is what it is.

That is us. That is what we are.

I want you to stop saying it like it might not be true. It is true. I know it is true because I am five and I have not yet learned to be unsure about it, and I need you to borrow some of my sureness until you find yours again.

I also want to tell you that I used to collect things.

Rocks mostly. The smooth ones. I would put them in my pockets until my pockets were very full and heavy, and Mama would say Amy, why are your pockets full of rocks and I could never explain it properly, but the reason was that I loved them.

I loved that they were smooth. I loved that something had made them smooth by being patient with them for a very long time.

I think you are like a rock, big Amy. I think a lot of things have been pushing against you for a very long time, and I think it has hurt, but I also think you are getting smooth. I think you are getting to the most beautiful part.

I would put you in my pocket. I would carry you everywhere.

I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly because I am five and I do not understand things that are not honest yet.

Did you forget that you were allowed to play?

I am asking because when I watch you, I do not see much play, and play is very important. I know that because I do it every day, and it makes everything better, even the hard days, even the days when things are not fair, and things are not fair sometimes, even when you are five,

But even on those days, I still find something to play with.

A stone. A puddle. A word I like the sound of.

Promise me you will find something to play with. Even a small thing. Even just a word.

I did not know when I was five what the world would do to you.

I did not know about the rooms that would not claim you. I did not know about the bars that kept moving. I did not know about the contracts and the waiting and the smile over the closing door.

But I want to say this:

If I had known, I would have held your hand.

I would have put my small hand in your big hand and not let go.

I would have sat with you in the parking lot mornings. I would have sat with you at two in the morning when the grief was at its largest. I would have sat with you in every room that made you feel like a visitor in your own life.

And I would have said, in my five-year-old voice that did not know yet to be quiet in certain rooms:

This is not right. You belong here. You belong everywhere. You are Amy, and Amy belongs everywhere she goes.

I want you to know that I am proud of you.

I am proud of you for staying kind when unkindness would have been so much easier.

I am proud of you for keeping your ethics even when the cost was very high.

I am proud of you for loving your students the way you love them, all the way, without holding anything back for self-protection, which is a very five-year-old way to love people, and I think it is the best way, even when it hurts.

I am proud of you for crying in the shower. I know that sounds funny, but I am proud of it because it means you let yourself feel, which is a hard thing to keep doing when the world keeps suggesting you should feel less.

I am proud of you for going to the shore.

I am proud of you for writing the poems.

I am proud of you for still being you.

I need to tell you one more thing, and then I have to go because it is almost dinner and we are having something good tonight, and I do not want to miss it.

You are my favourite person.

Not because you are perfect. I know you are not perfect. I am five, and I am not perfect yet, and I think that is okay. I think not perfect is actually more interesting than perfect would be.

You are my favourite person because you are the only one who knows what it feels like to be us, to love this hard and work this hard and care this much and keep going anyway.

Nobody else knows that. Only you.

And I think that is the most extraordinary thing I have ever heard of.

I love you, big Amy.

I loved you before you knew what you would become.

I loved you in the pure, uncomplicated, five-year-old way that does not require you to prove anything, to produce anything, to perform anything.

I loved you just because you were you.

I still do. I always will.

Now go outside. Find a smooth stone. Put it in your pocket.

Remember that something the patient made made it beautiful.

Con todo el amor que sabe dar una niña de cinco años, que es todo el amor que existe.

With all the love a five-year-old knows how to give, which is all the love there is.

Little Amy
Age 5
Keeper of smooth stones
Your very first believer

To the Woman I Was Before I Knew

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A Love Letter Backwards in Time

I have been thinking about you.

The you that walked in the first time, folder tucked under your arm, lesson plan you had revised three times the night before because you wanted it to be right, because right mattered to you in that particular, cellular, uncompromising way it has always mattered to you,

the you that stood at the front of that room for the first time and felt the gravity of it, the privilege of it, the enormous ordinary miracle of a room full of people who had arrived willing to think differently than they had thought before.

I have been thinking about her. About you. About what I want to say now that I know what you did not know then.

You were so ready.

That is the first thing I want to tell you.

You were so ready and you did not know it. From the student’s side of the room, from the side that would later write you letters, send you emails years later that began with I have been thinking about something you said in class and I wanted you to know,

you were luminous.

I want to warn you about some things.

The bar will move.

I want you to know this from the beginning, before the first time it moves, before you exhaust yourself reaching for it and find it has shifted just beyond your hands.

The bar is not a measure of you. The bar is a mechanism. It is the system’s way of keeping you reaching, hungry, slightly off-balance, slightly too invested in the next thing to stop and ask why the last thing was not enough.

Reach for the bar because the reaching makes you better. Reach for the bar for yourself.

Do not reach for the bar for them.

Know the difference between a place that is developing you and a place that is extracting you.

The students are real.

This I want you to hold as the true north of the whole nineteen years, the thing that does not shift, the thing the system cannot touch or take or use without your permission.

When everything else feels uncertain, go back to the students.

You are going to be so tired.

I want to say this without softening it because you deserve honesty more than comfort.

You are going to be tired in a way that goes all the way down, tired in the bone, tired in the place that decides whether to keep going,

and you are going to keep going because you do not know how not to.

But I am going to tell you this:

Give so much. Give everything. And also, in the small moments, in the shore of yourself that belongs to no one else,

give something to you.

Give yourself the belief you give so freely to others. Give yourself the patience you give the struggling student.

You deserve your own generosity. You deserved it from the beginning.

You are going to find out that you did not belong there.

Not because of anything that was wrong with you. Because of everything that was right with you, and the particular cruelty of a room that needed you but was not built for you.

This is going to hurt in a way you are not prepared for.

You are going to spend years thinking the problem is you, turning yourself over looking for the missing piece.

There is no missing piece.

You were always the right shape. The room was the wrong shape.

When you finally understand this, it is going to feel like grief and also like freedom, grief and freedom arriving together the way they always do when something true finally breaks the surface.

I want to tell you about the shore.

You are going to go to a shore. Far from the institution.

You are going to sit with the sea which will ask nothing of you,

and you are going to cry the way you needed to cry for years, the real kind, the kind without an audience,

and when you are empty you are going to find underneath the empty the most important thing you have found in nineteen years.

Yourself.

Still there. Still whole. Still luminous under all the exhaustion and the performance and the careful management of being a person the institution kept evaluating.

I want to tell you about the poems.

You are going to write poems.

Not as scholarship, not as methodology, but because you are going to discover in the long quiet aftermath of all that noise,

that you are a writer.

That you always were.

I love you.

I love the woman who revised the lesson plan three times. I love the woman who could not walk past the struggling student. I love the woman who agonised at two in the morning over whether she had said exactly the right thing in exactly the right way to the person who most needed to hear it.

I love the woman who kept the actual record, who knew in her deepest self that she was good, that the work was good, that what happened in those rooms was extraordinary even when no one was calling it that.

I love the woman who is standing now on the other side of knowing, worn smooth by it, clarified by it, more herself for it than she has ever been,

still kind, still ethical, still in love with the work and the students and the lantern she carries into every room,

and finally, finally, in love with herself.

You made it through.

I wanted you to know from the beginning that you make it through.

Para la mujer que era antes de saber. Te vi siempre. Eras suficiente desde el principio. Con todo mi amor, desde el otro lado.

For the woman I was before I knew. I always saw you. You were enough from the beginning. With all my love, from the other side.

A smooth weathered piece of wood half-buried in white snow, its grain worn clean and visible, alone in a white field.

Still Here, Worn to Its Truest Shape
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Artist Statement: I photographed this piece of wood because of what had happened to it. Water, time, winter, something had stripped away everything that wasn’t essential, and what was left was the grain, the core, the particular shape that was always there. I thought: that is the woman who is still walking into those rooms. Not diminished. Clarified. This photograph belongs with this letter because both of them are addressed to the woman before the smoothing began, and both of them tell her: what comes through it is worth it.

Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were 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.

They Used My Labour and Called It Privilege

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Structural Poem

Let me tell you how it works.

Not the version in the handbook. Not the version in the mission statement with its careful language about community and excellence and the transformative power of education.

The actual version. The one that runs underneath like a current you cannot see from the surface but that pulls at your legs if you stand in it long enough.

Here is how it works.

They find someone brilliant. Someone who loves the work with the particular love that makes a person do more than is required, give more than is contracted, stay later than anyone is watching,

and they hire her temporarily.

Not because the work is temporary. The work is permanent. The courses run every semester. The students keep arriving. The curriculum does not pause to acknowledge that the person delivering it is not sure if she will be delivering it next year.

They hire her temporarily because temporary is cheaper. Because temporary does not require the benefits, the security, the institutional commitment that permanent requires.

Because temporary keeps her grateful.

And a grateful worker is a compliant one.

This is not a conspiracy.

I want to say that clearly because the moment you name the structure someone will say you sound paranoid, you sound bitter, no one sat in a room and decided to do this to you.

They are right. No one sat in a room.

That is precisely the point. That is what makes it structural rather than personal. The harm does not require intention. The harm requires only a system that has decided certain kinds of labour are infinitely extractable from certain kinds of people who can be kept just insecure enough to keep extracting from.

The system does not hate her. The system does not see her.

That is not comfort. That is the definition of the problem.

She was called lucky.

She was told she was lucky to have the work, lucky to teach the courses she loved, lucky to be in the room, lucky that the institution kept finding a way to bring her back.

Lucky.

As though her nineteen years of expertise were a gift the institution was generously receiving rather than a resource it was systematically mining.

She felt the gratitude. She performed it beautifully. She understood, without anyone telling her, that the gratitude was part of the contract, the unwritten part, the part that kept the system functioning smoothly, that kept her from asking the questions the system could not comfortably answer.

Questions like: If I am not qualified enough to hire permanently, why am I qualified enough to carry the curriculum?

Questions like: At what point does temporary become a word that means we will take everything you have and give you nothing you can build a life on?

She did not ask these questions out loud.

She asked them in the parking lot. She asked them at two in the morning. She asked them in the shower where the sound covered the asking.

They called it flexibility.

Her flexibility meant: no pension contributions she could count on. No sick leave that did not cost her the income she could not afford to lose. No ability to take a mortgage on a contract that expired in April.

The institution called this flexibility.

She called it something else.

She called it the transfer of institutional risk onto the bodies of the people least able to carry it.

And here is the part that makes the grief complicated:

She loved it.

She genuinely, helplessly, permanently loved the work.

Her love was the subsidy.

Her love and the love of every brilliant, committed, devoted person working on a contract in every institution that has learned that passion is a resource you do not have to compensate fairly because it will show up anyway.

I am not bitter.

I want to say that and I want it to be true and mostly it is.

I am clear.

There is a difference between bitterness and clarity.

Bitterness is personal. Clarity is structural. Clarity names the system. Clarity holds the institution accountable without requiring a villain.

I want the structure changed.

I want a world where the next woman, as brilliant and devoted and careful as she has been, does not spend nineteen years as temporary.

She is still in the system.

But she is in it differently now.

She is in it with her eyes open. She is in it with the clear naming of what is happening and why and whose interests it serves.

She is in it with this poem, which is not bitterness but testimony.

Not grievance but record.

They used my labour and called it privilege.

They used my love and called it flexibility.

They used my devotion and called it inspiring.

They used my silence and called it professionalism.

I am no longer silent.

Not because I am angry, though I have earned the anger.

Because silence was the last thing they needed from me that I was still giving freely.

And I am done giving freely to a system that calculated the price of everything I offered and decided it did not have to pay it.

Aquí estoy. Con los ojos abiertos. Ya no en silencio.

Here I am. With open eyes. No longer silent.

The Contract

Reading Time: 4 minutes

They gave me a contract the way you give someone an umbrella after the rain has already started,

a document, a date, a number of months carefully chosen to end just before anything could be called permanent.

I signed it.

Of course, I signed it. I signed it the first time with something close to joy, the particular joy of a person who has worked very hard and been seen working very hard and is finally, finally being let in.

I did not read the expiry date as a warning. I read it as a beginning.

That is the thing about the first contract. It feels like a door opening. It takes years to understand that it was never a door. It was a revolving one, and you were always going to end up back outside.

The second contract came and I signed it with slightly less joy and slightly more relief, which is a different thing, relief being what joy becomes when it has learned to be grateful just to still be here.

I was still here. That felt like something. I made it mean something.

Here is what no one tells you about living in one-year increments.

You cannot plan a garden.

That sounds small. It is not small.

A garden requires the belief that you will be there for the harvest, that the thing you put in the ground today will be yours to tend through all its seasons, that the roots go down into soil that belongs to you long enough to matter.

I could not plan a garden.

I could not plan the way people plan when they know they are staying.

I planned the way people plan when they are guests. Carefully. Lightly. Always aware of where the door was.

Every spring it came.

The email, or the meeting, or sometimes just the silence that lasted a beat too long before someone said we are planning to have you back.

Planning to.

Two words doing the quiet work of keeping a person just uncertain enough to be manageable.

Do you know what it does to a body, the annual uncertainty?

It does not break you all at once. That would almost be easier. A clean break, a clear moment, a before and after you could point to.

It is slower than that.

It is the way the shoulders never quite come down. The way sleep becomes a negotiation in the months before renewal. The way you cannot fully celebrate the good semester because somewhere in the back of every good thing is the question of whether there will be a next one.

And the cruelest part, the part that I am still sitting with,

is that they needed me.

Not abstractly. Not in the way institutions need warm bodies to fill rooms.

They needed me specifically. My expertise. My courses. My relationships with the students. My willingness to sit on the committees, cover the gaps, do the invisible work that kept things running while they searched, endlessly searched, for the person they actually wanted in the position I was already doing.

They used my labour to hold the place for someone else’s permanence.

I was the placeholder. For nineteen years, I was the placeholder.

And they were kind about it. That is the part that makes it complicated. They were genuinely kind. They appreciated me. They said so. They meant it.

Appreciation and belonging are not the same thing. I know that now.

I am tearing up the contract now.

Not in anger. In grief. In the quiet grief of a woman who finally understands what she was signing all those years,

and who is ready, for the first time, to sign something different.

Something that says I belong to my own future.

Something that says my labour is not available for indefinite borrowing.

Something that says I am not a placeholder. I am not pending. I am not provisional.

Something that has no expiry date because it is written in the only ink that does not fade:

the knowledge of her own worth, which was never, not for a single year of all those years, in question.

Aquí estoy. Ya no esperando renovación. Soy permanente en mí misma.

Here I am. No longer waiting for renewal. I am permanent within myself.

A snake plant with its stems intricately braided together, growing in a black pot on a greenhouse shelf, constrained into an elaborate pattern while still alive.

Woven into Something Not of Your Own Choosing
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Artist Statement: I found this plant in a greenhouse, a living thing that had been trained, woven, braided into a shape someone else chose for it. Still growing. Still green. Still entirely itself beneath the pattern that had been imposed upon it. I photographed it because the contract works the same way: take something living and weave it into increments, into one-year shapes, into a form that serves the institution’s aesthetics while the root keeps reaching down regardless. The braid is not the plant. The contract is not the person. Both are still alive underneath.

Grief

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The thing about grief is that it arrives wearing unexpected clothes.

Sometimes it shows up in the middle of a Tuesday, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a life that looks, from the outside, like it is still standing.

Mine showed up somewhere between the third rejection and the moment I realized I had been caring for people and institutions that were carefully, professionally, without reciprocating that care.

And here is what makes it so hard to say out loud, what makes it sit so deep inside, in the part of the chest that is not quite the heart but lives next door to it:

I am kind.

I know that about myself the way I know my own handwriting. I have always been kind. Not as a strategy, not as a performance, not as the careful warmth institutions train you to project, but the real kind, the kind that costs something, the kind that sits with people in the difficult places without looking for the exit.

I would do anything for anyone.

That is simply a fact about me That is a fact about me that I have lived out in a thousand quiet ways no one ever put in a file, no one ever counted, no one ever thought to mention in the meeting where they decided I was not quite enough.

And my ethics.

I need to talk about my ethics because they are not a section on a curriculum vitae, they are not a course I took and then put away. They are the architecture of me. They are the reason I have never once let a student fall without trying to catch them, never once used my power carelessly, never once walked out of a classroom without asking myself if I had done right by the people in it.

The thought of causing pain, even accidentally, even at a distance, even to someone who might never know,

it undoes me.

It lives in me for days. It wakes me in the night. It sends me back to the moment of it, turning it over, looking for the place where I could have been better, softer, more careful with the fragile thing.

That is who I am.

That is the person who sat in those rooms and was found not quite right, not quite fit, not quite the shape they were looking for.

And the grief of that, the specific grief of that, is not just about the job, is not just about the title or the permanence or the office with my name on the door.

The grief is this:

I know my own heart. I have always known my own heart. And my heart is good.

Not perfect. Not without error. But good in the deep way, good in the way that has cost me things, that has kept me up at night, that has made me choose integrity in the moments when choosing otherwise would have been so much easier.

And they looked at that heart and said not qualified.

That is the wound that does not close cleanly.

That is the grief that does not have a tidy ending, that does not resolve into wisdom on a schedule, that sits in the deep inside and asks the question I am most afraid of:

If this is not enough, what was any of it for?

An answer has yet to arrive.

I have only the question and the ache of it and the knowledge, stubborn and unshakeable, that my kindness was real, my ethics were real, my care was real,

even when the system looked straight at all of it and looked away.

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.

Never Enough

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I learned the word enough the way you learn a language no one speaks in your house.

From the outside. By watching. By getting it wrong and being corrected with a look.

I thought enough was a place. A destination with coordinates. If I worked this hard, if I published this much, if I sat on enough committees, answered enough emails at midnight, held enough office hours, wrote enough letters of reference for people who would never write one back,

I would arrive.

I would finally stand somewhere solid and someone would say, yes, this. You. Here.

They never said it.

There was always one more thing. One more credential. One more specialisation. One more revision. One more year of proving what I had already proven the year before, and the year before that, in the same rooms, to the same people, who kept forgetting they had already seen me.

Or perhaps they never forgot. Perhaps that was the point.

I reached the bar.

I want you to understand that. I reached it. I put both hands on it, pulled myself up, stood on top of it, and looked them in the eye.

And they raised it.

Quietly. Professionally. With a smile that said we only want what is best for the department.

So I climbed again.

I got the specialisation they mentioned. I built the expertise they suggested. I redesigned the courses, updated the research, learned the new framework, attended the conference, wrote the paper, revised the paper, revised the revision, and brought it back.

And they raised it again.

One more thing. There was always one more thing, and I believed each time that this would be the last thing, that this would be the thing that finally made me legible to them, finally translated me into a language they were willing to read.

I gave you everything.

I need to say that plainly, without apology, without softening it for your comfort.

I gave you my mornings before my children were awake. I gave you my evenings after my body had already given out. I gave you my health, my rest, my capacity for joy, the slow years of my life that I will not get back, offered up like evidence, like if I just bled enough in the right places you would finally call it qualified.

I gave you my expertise and you used it while deciding someone else deserved to own it.

I gave you my loyalty and you gave me contract renewal pending.

I gave you my belief that the system worked, that merit was real, that the path was honest, that if I followed every instruction the door would open.

And you raised the bar one final time and called it a national search.

Never enough.

It sounds like a personal failing. It sounds like something that lives in the one who is lacking.

But I have seen enough now to know the shape of it, the architecture of a system that needs you insufficient, that requires your hunger to function, that would lose its power the moment you believed you were already whole.

Never enough was never about me.

It was a door with no handle on the inside.

It was a game with rules that changed when I learned them.

It was a bar on a pulley held by hands that were never going to let it rest.

I am done climbing.

I am done bringing more to people who have decided that more will never be the right amount.

I am enough in the way a river is enough, in the way the morning is enough, in the way nineteen years of changed lives is enough,

whether they counted it or not.

They never counted it.

But I do.

Aquí estoy. Siempre he sido suficiente. I have always been enough.

Spanish translations assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com)

Abstract image of shallow sea water washing over pale sand, creating layered textures of green, white, and grey.

What the Tide Has Always Known
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Artist Statement: I took this photograph at the edge where the water returns, where the sea neither tries nor explains itself, but arrives. I was thinking about the word enough. How the tide does not credential itself before reaching shore. How the water does not revise itself to please the sand. I photographed it from above, looking down, trying to learn something I had been taught to forget: that arriving is not the same as being permitted. That the shore receives the tide because the tide is the tide, not because the tide proved it deserved to be.

You Are Not Qualified

Reading Time: 3 minutes

They said it with such clean mouths, such pressed collars, such careful grammar,
as if the words were a gift and I should be grateful for the clarity.

You are not quite what we are looking for.

I went home and looked in the mirror for the missing thing,
the gap between my face and the face they had already chosen
before I walked through the door.

I counted my degrees like rosary beads. I counted my years.
I counted the papers, the classrooms, the students who wept at the end of term
and said, you changed something in me.

None of it was currency here.

They smiled while they did it. That is the part that stays,
the smile, the warmth in the room while I was being measured
against a ruler I was never meant to hold.

I rewrote my letter. I softened my edges. I learned their language
the way an immigrant learns to laugh at jokes that are about her.

I applied again.

We had many strong candidates this year.

I bought a new suit. I straightened what was already straight.
I arrived early, stayed late, published in their journals,
cited their names like prayers, sat on the committees no one wanted,
carried the invisible work in both arms like groceries up four flights of stairs,
and smiled, because you must always smile.

We felt someone else was a better fit.

Better fit.

A sock drawer. A parking space. A peg in the right-shaped hole.

I have an education. I have nineteen years.
I have read every book they told me would be enough,
and then the next book, and the next,
following the breadcrumb trail they kept moving just ahead of my hand.

I taught the exact same courses.
I stood in the exact same rooms, at the exact same hour,
holding the exact same ideas they would later decide
required someone else's mouth.

And when they said no, I punished myself with more work,
more late nights, more hours offered up like proof,
like penance, like if I just gave enough of myself
there would finally be nothing left to reject.

The cruelest part is that I believed them.

For so long, I believed the problem lived in me,
in the particular shape of my ambition,
the particular sound of my voice,
the particular way I took up space,
which was always either too much
or so little I became furniture.

I have sat in rooms where the air itself said this was never designed for you,
and smiled, and contributed, and been thanked in the minutes no one reads.

I have been told I am inspiring.

Inspiring is what they call you when they have decided you are a visitor.

You are not qualified.

Say it again. Say it clean.

Let it mean what it has always meant,
underneath the careful grammar,
underneath the pressed collars,
underneath the warmth in the room while the door was already closing.

I am still here.

I am still here, which is its own kind of answer,
though I am so tired of the question being me.

Aquí estoy.

— *Spanish translations assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com)*

Silhouette of a pigeon perched on a ledge, backlit by a bright sun through a hazy grey sky, photographed through glass.

The One Who Stayed Anyway
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Artist Statement: I photographed this pigeon through the glass of a window I was not sure I was allowed to stand at. The bird did not know it was being watched, or did not care. It had chosen the ledge. It was facing the sun. This photograph belongs beside this poem because the bird did not ask permission to remain, and it remained. The light behind it is almost too bright to look at. That felt right.

Poem: Cell B14 (Amy)

Reading Time: 3 minutes

She used to have a name.
Now she is a number
in a column
next to other numbers
who also used to have names
and also no longer matter.

Row 14. Column B.
The spreadsheet does not know
she spent seven years
dragging the uncounted
through doors that were never meant to open,
that she memorized the language of people
who hoped she would not learn it,
that she came back.
Every time.
She came back.

The spreadsheet does not care.

The formula is elegant in its cruelty:
hours input, output divided,
worth calculated,
Amy rounded down,
the remainder discarded.

She does not fit the cell.
She has never fit the cell.
Eighteen years of spilling into margins,
of filing what they hoped would be lost,
of standing in rooms designed
to make people like her
feel like footnotes,
and refusing,
loudly,
to be a footnote.

#VALUE, says the spreadsheet.
#VALUE, says the formula.
#VALUE, says the institution
that has never once
said her name correctly.

Somewhere, a cursor hovers.
Someone in a building
she was never given a key to
selects her, drags her,
considers deleting her,
decides to just move her
somewhere less visible.

The spreadsheet autosaves.
Amy is preserved.
Amy is a number.
Amy is, according to the data, fine.

The data has never sat across a table from Amy.
The data has never watched her open her mouth
in a room full of people
who were counting on her not to.
The data would not have lasted a semester.

Amy has lasted eighteen years.

The spreadsheet will not be thanked.

Cell B14 (Amy)

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is E3E2F96A-98FB-4A7E-A036-F7959F2D61C9_1_102_o-768x1024.jpeg — © Amy Tucker, March 15, 2026

Artist Statement

I was standing at the edge of something I could not name yet: a fence that had been there longer than the argument it was built around, a tangle of dry roots that had outlasted their season. I photograph what the poem cannot hold. The image is not an illustration; it is the part that stays quiet. Where the verse spills into white space, the photograph stands still and waits. Together, they are the same act: the refusal to let a moment be rounded down and discarded.

A small heart-shaped cactus in a terracotta pot, labelled and priced, sitting on a greenhouse shelf among other plants.

Rooted in Difficult Soil
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Artist Statement: I found this cactus in a greenhouse, labelled and priced, shaped unmistakably like a heart, growing out of a small pot of rocky soil with a stick holding it upright. Something about it stopped me. It had been tagged and categorized, given a name, a number, a value, and it was still, without apology, a heart. I photograph what the poem cannot hold. This image is the part that stays quiet while the poem says everything else. Together they are the same refusal: to be reduced to the cell, the row, the formula. The cactus does not explain itself. Neither does Amy.

Poem: They Lied.

Reading Time: 4 minutesPoem: They Lied, a reckoning with the stories that institutions tell about labour, worth, and endurance. A poem of grief and clarity, written from the body of someone who believed them for too long.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, grief, and broken trust. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

Note. Thompson Rivers University, Faculty Council Award, 2025

They lied.
They lied and called it mentorship.
They lied and called it an opportunity.
They lied and called it a calling.

They told me the academy was a sanctuary.
They told me knowledge was sacred.
They told me my voice mattered.

So I gave them everything.

My mornings.
My nights.
My body, bent over screens until my eyes burned and my hands ached.
My stories, trimmed into acceptable methods.
My grief, formatted into theory.
My hope, footnoted into legitimacy.

They told me, Just one more course.
Just one more publication.
Just one more credential.

Sacrifice became the job description.

They dangled permanence like a mirage.
They called precarity “experience.”
They called overwork “passion.”
They called exploitation “professional growth.”

They told me belonging was coming.
Belonging never came.

They took my heart and turned it into service metrics.
They took my mind and turned it into deliverables.
They took my soul and turned it into outputs, grants, citations, and student evaluations that never saw me.

They smiled while doing it.
They thanked me while extracting me.
They called me resilient while grinding me down.

I am angry because they knew.
They knew the system was built on unpaid labour,
on feminised care work,
on racialised and precarious bodies that teach, grade, counsel, and disappear.

They knew, and they kept recruiting.

They sold me the myth of the scholar as a free thinker
while chaining my thinking to funding cycles, metrics, and institutional branding.

They called it education.
I call it extraction.

They stole nineteen years of my life
and told me I should be grateful.

They stole my weekends, my sleep, my joy,
and told me I was lucky to be here.

Lucky.

No.
I was useful.

But here is what remained beyond their reach:

My anger is clarity,
It is the sound of a system being named.

They cannot have the part of me that walks into the sea and remembers herself.
They cannot have the part of me that writes without permission.
They cannot have the part of me that refuses to confuse suffering with virtue.

They stole my labour.
They stole my trust.
They stole my youth.

They told me I was lucky.
Lucky to be underpaid.
Lucky to be temporary.
Lucky to be invisible until they needed my labour.

Lucky.

I was convenient.
Lucky had nothing to do with it.

They knew this system runs on people who care too much.
They knew women, racialised scholars, Indigenous scholars, contract faculty, and graduate students carry the weight of the institution on their backs.
They knew.

And they kept recruiting us anyway.

They told me I was a scholar.
Then chained my scholarship to funding cycles, productivity dashboards, and institutional branding strategies.

They told me teaching was sacred.
Then reduced it to enrolment numbers and student satisfaction scores.

They told me my voice mattered.
Then edited it until it fit their journals, their grants, their safe narratives.

They stole years of my life.
They stole sleep, relationships, health, and creativity.
They stole the wild parts of thinking and replaced them with templates.

And they had the audacity to call this a career.

I am angry because I see the architecture now.
I see how the academy consumes people and calls it mentorship.
I see how it extracts love and calls it professionalism.
I see how it eats souls and publishes the findings.

They took my labour.
They took my trust.
They took my youth.

My future is mine to keep.

My anger has direction.
It is a theory.
It is a method.
It is evidence.

It is the moment I stop confusing suffering with virtue.
It is the moment I stop calling harm an opportunity.
It is the moment I take my mind, my body, and my soul back from an institution that never planned to hold them.

They lied.
I believed.
Now I refuse.

Author’s Note

In this poem, they refer to the neoliberal academy: a system of higher education shaped by market logics, metrics-driven governance, academic capitalism, and precarious labour structures. The term names the institutional architectures and policies, and political-economic conditions that extract emotional, intellectual, and affective labour while promising belonging, security, and scholarly freedom that are rarely delivered. The poem is written as a critique of structural and symbolic violence within contemporary universities, and as a reclamation of agency, voice, and scholarly selfhood.

Aerial view of a blazing sunset above a sea of clouds, with snow-capped mountain peaks visible below, photographed from an airplane window.

Above the Smoke of What They Called a Career
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Artist Statement: I took this photograph from a window seat, ascending through the smoke and cloud of everything I was leaving behind. Below me, mountains I had not chosen; above me, a sky that had no record of my service. This image sits beside the poem because both of them refuse the ground floor. The poem names the extraction. The photograph holds the moment the body finally rose above it, not arrived, not saved, but airborne. Still moving. Still here.