un/locking

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Beaty is a poet and med student from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is enrolled in medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he also received his undergraduate degree and completed an Honors Poetry Thesis. He earned a Master's in Physiology at the University of Louisville. His poems have been published in Figure 1, CP Quarterly, Ice Lolly Review, The Ex-Puritan and other poetry journals. His poem, “un/locking” speaks to how terror—an unwelcome legacy—can be passed down from generation to generation. He notes how sometimes healing can be a destructive process, even when it doesn’t feel like it. He writes because, “Some things need to be said, and I’m slowly figuring out how to say them.” Follow Sean on Twitter @seanw0ww.

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un/locking

BY SEAN BEATY

Copyright 2025. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

un/locking

algorithms and subroutines

are coded into acids and proteins

as tides turbulent in my veins

two strands twist in terror

so tight they become nuclear

cold steel was bound in my chromosomes

when my ancestors had their genes unzipped

and fear installed into their bones

the difference between locking

and unlocking is a twist of the wrist

just right or just wrong

the difference between living and not-dying

is one turn away from wrong

to salvage what’s left

the difference between a crutch and a column

is faith against crumbling

i’m always crumbling

my head is a trellis of deadly diegesis

i pull my locks to see

which sit right in my head

which ones shake loose

which ones break

when i ravel

my pain is set in histones

and my prisons are soaked in blood

cells tend to replicate until

they become unbearable

so when i unravel

the bursting is a translation

of freedom

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