Safe word
Just in:
Loaded question driven by unlicensed scuffler crushed by accelerating derisions
Destination decisively unknown
It’s tomorrow already
The words don’t stay down
no matter how saccharined
any more than the listeners
whose breakdowns spit back
the reflux of the despised
❉ ❉
How we wombed the
accents that ⫤ became ⊨ the dialects that ⫤ became ⊨ the pidgins that ⫤ became ⊨ the creoles that ⫤ became ⊨ our
lacerated language
every phoneme inculcated to our descendants
Our pronouns are we and us
and we protect us with every dictionary
❉ ❉
Just out:
All history is recounted in hissed syllables
therefore pursue what babbling excavates
❉ ❉
Your vision, what? It clamps
a vise on our choked aspiration
We sputter the sibilants you appropriated from the dead ruffians of a foreign watershed
now that we can’t strut the runway laid out for us
the only way out is to run
This poem was published in the 2023 issue of The Waiting Room from Nervous Ghost Press.
Andy Oram
June 17, 2021
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