My Language
my tongue is fluent in
the subtle shades between
punctuate and puncture,
tincture and truncate,
in the clipped dialect of ghosts,
pursuant to the argot of loa,
-collapse or suffocate me,
my speech is dust
and as incorrupt
as the bodies of saints
rosary-wrapped and bound to
the beaded word by rust
hovering in the vowels of an open gate,
my howl, filed to a sheen
and pummeled into paint,
exiled to gilt,
to gold this splinter, i
grow from corpse to coronate.
First published in Across The Margin, 2022