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,&