1.
The old man speaks in fragments. His mouth is a bombed out building. His tonsils are the Twin Towers. He speaks with an accent--the natural inflections of his voice taking sharp turns in the subway terminal of his tongue. His native language is rubble between his teeth. He has left behind the twang of New York speech. He has left the entirety of the Spanish language back on an island. He's adapted a new dialect, a new way of destroying his mouth, and the old man speaks in fragments because when he speaks, he is never wholly home.
2.
The child speaks in fragments. He is groping his way through communication. Fumbling through letters and syllables and growing his way out of baby-talk. He sounds out vowels in his sleep. His tongue is being broken into the pattern of intelligible speech, his teeth are pushing from his gums into a mouth made of English language. On his way towards complete understanding, he scrapes his speech and stumbles over his words. He struggles to construct block-towers of dialect in his newborn mouth. The child speaks in fragments, because he has not yet learned to form coherent words or whole strings of speech, and his mouth is not fully formed.
3.
The girl writes in fragments. Her poetic words splinter and disintegrate as soon as she puts them down to paper. Her mouth is an obliterated anomaly, alienated from her existence. So she turns to her hands and she turns to her mind and she asks them to do something interesting. And she tries to build cities of prose and poetry with feeble letters and syllables on a page. She tries to construct towers of sentences and vowels that will soothe the pain in her debris filled mouth. She spits out all the words she never said, and they drop like bombs on paper and explode into catastrophic attempts at eloquence. The girl writes in fragments, because her mouth has been broken into pieces and her fingers cannot emulate anything other than fractions. She has only ever known decimals, so she writes in fragments, and she rearranges them and rearranges them in hopes that they will form something whole.
YOU ARE READING
seams and stitching ♡ published
Poetry"this is your kind of story. no one is the good guy-- no one is the bad guy-- the blame shifts from monster to monster and in this place everyone bares their teeth." [featured. highest ranking: #6 in poetry.]
