THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.

My mother tongue is muscle memory between my teeth

But I don’t know how to love him

without reverting to a language

neither of us have in common

But when we woke from our slumber

Your tongue spoke a different dialect

Of the language you carved into my mouth

And you no longer understood my yearning

My lover’s language feels like foreign defeat on my tongue

Yet I say the words like I’ve spoken them for a millennium

And they sound like they’ve been plucked directly from his larynx

~A series of unfinished snippets // falling out of (the language of) love