TONGUELESS

I was born into a language
that taught me silence first.
The women before me stitched vowels into their throats
and called it survival.
My mother spoke softly so the walls wouldn’t hear.
My grandmother spat words into jars,
sealed them tight.

The men never asked.
They assumed the air around them was theirs to name.
My father’s voice cracked like a whip,
decibels louder than my mother’s love.
The priests spoke of god like they had
held her bones,
and the government scribbled laws in a dialect
that never learned to say no.

I tried once,
to speak with the shape of my own mouth.
But the men said it was vulgar, unnatural
for a woman to taste her own words.
They prefer us tongueless.
Silent but smiling,
familiar but forgettable.

In school, they taught me languages of conquerors.
English, Spanish, French — tongues of arrival and theft.
The only inheritance we were left with
was a dictionary of what we could not reclaim.
My people are fluent in translation —
We know how to make grief fit into smaller sentences.
We know how to dress shame in another nation’s verbs.

And still, the men argue about the gender of language,
as if a sentence must choose sides.
As if a noun can be broken down into pink or blue.
They call it grammatical necessity.
I call it a wound.

My mother once told me
that every tongue has a graveyard.
I imagine ours full of forgotten dialects,
the syllables curled like question marks.
No funerals. No mourning songs.
Plain drooping silence.

But I am learning now
to speak without apology.
To scrape the colonizer’s residue from my teeth.
I mispronounce their words on purpose.
I roll my R’s like thunder,
spit consonants like battle cries.
My tongue is a weapon they cannot disarm.

And when my daughter asks me why the world
sounds so loud,
I will tell her:
Because they are afraid.
Because a woman who knows the weight of her own voice
is the sound they tried to silence.
Because we were never meant to be
tongueless.

*

Instruction Manual for Being Human

step one:
you are born with the cord still attached,
red and slick, a snake that never leaves you.
it coils somewhere in the dark. your mother calls it love.
your father calls it god. you will call it hunger.

step two:
learn the word no but say yes anyway.
smile with your teeth even when they ache.
watch how the mirror fogs when you breathe —
proof that you exist, proof that you can still ruin something clean.

step three:
if a man touches you and you flinch,
convince yourself it was the wind.
if your body locks itself shut,
call it a trick of the light.

step four:
pain is a language you will learn to speak fluently.
twist your limbs into the shapes they expect.
hold your wrists like a fragile apology.
bleed discreetly. swallow the noise.

step five:
love will come and leave.
sometimes it will scrape its name across your ribs.
sometimes it will forget your name entirely.
this is normal.
this is expected.

step six:
bury the body.
not the one in the dirt, but the one in the bed.
the one who stares back at you in the window at night.
don’t ask what she wants.
she will never stop wanting.

step seven:
if the day comes when you look at the sky
and it does not beg you to stay,
close your eyes.
imagine a room with no doors.
call it freedom.

final step:
you were told to be soft,
but you sharpened your bones instead.
you were told to heal,
but you named the wound holy.
they will call this survival.
you will call it nothing at all.

*

Sreeja Naskar is a poet from West Bengal, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Modern Literature, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, and other literary journals.