translate yourself, badly

& the woman at the airport says i don’t sound like i’m from here.
i think of peeling an orange, slow, deliberate, waiting
for the inside to prove her right.

(i tell her i was born in a town with a name no one pronounces right.)

where the vowels drag their feet, where every mother speaks
like a sunday morning radio, thick with warning & weather reports.
she nods as if she understands. i know she does not.

(some people think language is just a trick of the mouth.)

but i know it’s a history you carry in your throat.
my grandmother folded prayers into dough, rolled them thin,
let them rise in the dark. my father spoke in calloused hands,
in long sighs at the kitchen table. my mother’s english wavered
when she was tired & mine does too, now.

this woman, with her neat syllables & easy vowels, does not know
that i have spent my whole life translating myself.
that i have clipped my tongue to fit in rooms that never made space for me.
that i have swallowed whole alphabets, let letters dissolve on my teeth
just to be understood.

(she does not know this language doesn’t fit in my throat anymore.)

i want to tell her i am from everywhere i have ever been silenced.
i am from every word i never said right the first time.
i am from a mother who softened her accent like butter in the sun,
who wanted her children to sound like open doors and welcome signs.

(but instead, i just smile, say, no, i guess i don’t.)

​

​

how to hold a dying language
my grandmother’s tongue is a river that no longer runs—
        i try to hold it in my mouth,
          but it spills, thick & heavy,
      like blood from a bitten lip.
like the soup she fed me when i was small,
like the spit she wiped from my chin,
saying, don’t waste what the body gives.

(the body gives & gives & still rots)

she wept in words i never learned.
her cries, a sound caught in her throat,
a bird fluttering against the ribs,
wings broken before it could fly.
she tried to teach me once,
pulled my hands through the flour,
shaped words from rice & salt.
i laughed,
my mouth full of something stolen.

(language tastes different when it’s dying)

 

some days,
she kneaded her sorrow into dough,
let it rise in warm places.
i ate it without knowing. swallowed it whole.

              (it is still inside me,
                      still soft in the middle.)

 

now, she is all bone.
her body small enough to fold into a drawer,
her voice a thing that lives only in echoes.
the last time i saw her,
she was unraveling at the edges,
her fingers tracing names on the table,
names that don’t belong to anyone anymore.

(does language die before the body,
    or does it linger like a ghost?)

​

when she goes,
i will bury her words in my chest,
tuck them between my ribs,

press them against my lungs
so i do not forget how to breathe.

​

​

self-portrait as a room without windows
fingernail moon on my collarbone
(left the light off again
for no one)

      cords unraveling under the tongue—
   mother’s hymn: stay still, stay soft
i mouthed it into the floorboards
            till the wood split

sink’s full of ghostfruit
orange skins curling like prayers
& something
(maybe me)
rots quiet in the drain

​

      you ever heard silence peel?
      like a paint-chip? like sin?
      i have.
                it’s holy in a kind of wrong way
—

i pulled the fuse from my chest /
all static now
breath like sugar in snowwater
thin-thin-thin
a light too sharp for this kind of skin

             (god, it’s cold where names used to be)
 

—
 

father left me nothing but his voice
stuck in the back of the fridge
humming low
like regret with a plug

(that’s love, right?)
 

—
hands all copper today

from holding the sun too long
or maybe it’s just blood
(no metaphor, just blood)

         no light here, but the dark listens
         no windows,
               just walls that breathe slow

              just me /
           & the heaviness
                of being un-glowing
                               un-glowed

—
 

he said some things are meant to stay switched off
so i
do
like it’s sacred
                  (like i’m sacred too, somehow)
tell me—
if a bulb never lights,
is it still
a wound?

​​

​​​​

Sreeja Naskar is a young poet with a passion for capturing emotion and complexity through words. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Crowstep Journal, Gone Lawn, ONE ART, The Scarred Tree, Cholla Needles, Poems India, and others.