Let Them Fear Our Faultlines

By Zarith Hanipah

They told us we were fragments—
shards of strange,
cracks in the crust,
too loud, too soft, too much,
not enough.

But they forgot what faultlines do.

We moved.
Underneath their cities.
Beneath their polished maps.
We shifted—not broken,
but breaking open.

We became plates colliding.
Pressure built in silence.
Then came the quake.

A march.
A mural.
A meal shared in the rain.
A protest chant turned lullaby.
A stranger who says, “You’re not alone.”
That’s when the ground began to sing.

Because when one voice stands,
it’s a whisper.
But when many breathe the same dream—
It’s tectonic.
It’s movement.
It’s revolution dressed as reunion.

This is our superpower:
We find each other in the dark,
link arms across borders and bruises,
and rewrite gravity.

We are the street choir,
the drag mother,
the trans kid in a refugee camp
daring to dance.
The grandmother learning pronouns
and how to love again.

Community is not soft.
It is not decoration.
It is bedrock.
It is power.
It is survival made beautiful.

Let them fear our faultlines.
Let them try to map our magnitude.
We are tectonic.
We were always meant to move mountains