Every other parent takes up the fight of their silent toddler down on both knees in prayer.
but not my mother, who goes all out with her new set of teeth—jammed against any oversized,
mouth-tearing accent that seizes me by the neck.
her ruminating, the way a hen crushes the grain of its life to bits for her chicks,
& feeds both father & son with the decibel. bloodstains on my voice.
we were all born locked-jaw, with no taste for speech,
till a dialect pours into us like wild honey from Lugard’s white, scented hands.
my mother understands, there’s only so much we as mutes can guzzle down,
before a sentence has us in chokehold. its brown spill, tying our musty breath.
I make sure to size up a beyond-language before engaging, the way mother
inspects my jaw before shoving in a vernacular, chewed to its own screamable debris.
I reckon my mother too, sees the brute in me each day I feed off her right hand,
asking where her sweet boy must have learned to swallow a language—the length of an arm.
or the Queen’s English that came for his throat, pronounced in the rag & royalty
of everything a mother would warn a son to steer clear of.
I still carry her tremor from the night we both leaned into a hug at the airport:
the razored, sharp realization of what mouth-tearing accent would wound the honey
out of her boy’s body, till he drops down flat as a buzz. a dying too insect not to sting.
all bodies sing its own brutal song. the fallen heap of me on the ground is an orchestra
performing loss the best way a black skin knows how to on foreign soil.
at the porch yard, my roommate pokes the brown music of a flower & calls it nectar:
its thick, sugary resin spilling from the white, scented hand of a tulip plant, like wasteful dialect.
imagine I was the soil’s soft jaw, poured into, sweet & without so much to guzzle down,
I won’t have experienced chokehold in the way language wraps my breath into a hiccup—
how a mother wraps the silent battle of her toddler & cares for it with her beak.
empathy known in a mouth-to-mouth exchange, & the accidental bite-marks that
leaves its watery remark on both sides of the cheek like a brown spill.
I fancy affection when it’s wet. I can tell a kiss from kismet
by how destiny rags the wound onto the rich, thickness of skin,
till the welt turns into wealth—which is royalty,
which is how everyone gets along with Queen’s English in this country.
Lord, I want to speak of my own volition.
let the honey not be wounded out of my body.
let me find accent in the most wild & kindest of places
I come against the brutish part of me & make it into British.
I want the terror to swallow the length of my arm whole & not make a scene of it.
when language slackens the mouth, let what’s left of the jaw not be a bruise beyond
what any religious mother is capable of caring for, either by kneeling or new set of teeth.
I manifest wealth, not the welt cottoned with a bottle of spirit
from Lugard’s white, scented hands.
I want royalty: to be so rich in a language everyone adores.