Tonight's Poet Corner: The Audio Editor

The Audio Editor
by Belinda

I have spliced up the footage
of my very first words as a baby
into a eulogy for my youth.
Sounds dramatic, I know, but
the sense amid gibberish
sustains me somehow through it all.

My mother held her curls up
with tiny serpents, their fangs buried
into each nervous, quivering
follicle. My father was already bald;
the sun kept an audience across
a surface made bare by God's unforgiving palm.

If the first word I spoke was, "Mama,"
then perhaps I should have been
a better wife. And if it was, "Dada,"
then perhaps I would be settling
my knees against an RV somewhere
in Arizona, where the canyon is a
mouth, and its teeth are tombstones.

But I spoke neither one initially. And
as I listen and relisten to the track,
I notice how incoherent I really was. Only
I'm not much more coherent now. And I
never learned how to speak the language
I needed to survive. And I finally realize
that saying, "I love you," meant a lot more
to you than three syllables and five vowels
lumped into a single, melting sugar cube.