sanctuary / battleground / ruins is not a trauma narrative, not a recovery arc, and not a story about healing. It is a system.

The book is deliberately engineered as controlled harm. Not chaos. Not spectacle. Not indulgence. Controlled, intentional, aware of its impact. The reader is not guided gently through meaning; they are moved through pressure. This is an assault in the legal sense: deliberate, forceful, contained.

The core premise is simple and brutal: harm does not end when violence stops. It relocates. It trains the body. It rewires the voice. It teaches silence, obedience, vigilance, and self-erasure long before it ever teaches fear. This book exists to make that architecture visible.

Sanctuary is not safety. It is a maintained fiction. Here, danger is present but managed. Silence is taught. Love is real, and that is what made harm survivable. Pain is absorbed so others do not have to confront it. The nervous system believes compliance might work. Harm survives because it does not look like harm.

The structure operates the way an abandoned house does. You move through it without expecting to find anything living there. One room appears warm and intact. Nothing seems wrong. You register it as tenderness and continue walking. It is only later that you notice the fracture in the wall. That is when you realize this is going to hurt. That is how this book works: recognition arrives late.

Battleground begins when denial fails. This is where harm is named, warned about, argued against, documented, and demanded to be acknowledged. I believe clarity will force intervention. I believe witnesses matter. I believe accountability is possible. The voice hardens. Sentences compress. Moral appeals burn themselves out. Fear stops being an excuse. Silence stops being neutral. The fight ends not because it was won, but because it no longer requires witnesses.

Ruins is not aftermath. It is orientation. Danger becomes ambient. The world continues. The body remembers anyway. These poems do not argue or persuade. They document what harm built and what survived it. The voice becomes exact. Ruins rejects redemption. It refuses closure. It does not perform healing. It maps continuation.

This book does not ask for empathy. It produces it by refusing to perform. Readers are not comforted. They are implicated. The structure forces recognition of how harm is enabled, minimized, inherited, and permitted to persist by systems, families, witnesses, and language itself. This is not a story about surviving abuse. It is a study in how abuse survives us.

The book closes without resolution or relief, leaving the weight where it belongs.