How to Talk

Give up on drawing breath from your chest. Give up on bringing it up through your throat into your mouth. Give up on your tongue touching your teeth or the draw gate of your glottis opening and closing. It’s not about the lips either. The lips are for kissing if you can find someone to kiss. Forget about the sound of your voice speaking, how it rises and falls like birds flying against a strong wind. Forget about the soft voice you sometimes use to make an impression. The noise from others drowns it out. Imagine pronouncing a single phoneme, then another and now you have a word and more words. Imagine the words drumming into sentences. Let your mind raise its voice and shout sentence after sentence so those around you nod in agreement or smile their acceptance. And even if no one can actually hear you—now you’re talking.

Done Time

Done talking nonsense. Done with brittle tongues and bad brewers, with broods of chickens scratching the dirt. Done with the darkness at the center of darkness—it may be another kind of light. Done with drone mosquitoes buzzing at the windows—and the drones that unload exploding packages. Done with the birds delivering diseases, the doctors painting masterpieces—their floating deathbeds. Done with the wisdom of oracles whose disembodied heads bob up and down in the roiling river, singing their cliches like prophecies. Done waiting for justice to knock Humpty Dumpty off his wall, for his shell to be shattered—the yolk smashed. Done believing that there is a period at the end of a war.

What Her Hand Says

Her hand opens and closes: yes when she opens it, no when she closes it until the loose bulb of her fist bangs against air and collapses. When her hands fold together, she is saying “thank you.” When you touch your heart for her and lean over the bedrails, she touches your heart. The nurse dampens her lips with a sponge stick. Even the tiniest hint of food or water would choke her paralyzed throat. When you hold up the laminated alphabet, she struggles to tap the letters and you guess the wrong words again and again until she is almost smiling. She grips your hand and falls asleep in your silence.

Homeland

“You should visit Hungary,” my sister said. “It’s our homeland.” “How can it be my homeland?” I asked. “I’ve never been there.” “Everyone there has dad’s brown eyes and his rock of a chin.” Everyone looks like him and like us.” I peered into my sister’s face and saw my father’s face and then my own. I remembered how my father combed Wildroot into his black curly hair, huffing so forcefully he fogged up the bathroom mirror, how he whipped the comb away, flinging oily drops on the tile floor, how at dinner he inhaled the hot breath of Hungarian stew as though it were the air rising from the earth of his homeland. A country of our people, I thought, everyone looking like everyone else, everyone looking like us—every face a mirror of every face. “Scary, I said. “I’m not going.”