#truthsinword

When love flickers in the corners

It opens in me what I pretend is a need to confess

What is actually a need to blame everything for my cowardice

This preference for men whose daughters will not have my eyes

Anyone who threatens to matter

Who is not my preferred shade of disposable

Whose shoulders are enough to tell me that I will succumb to the softness

That I spent a lifetime coaching out of this body

This is the one that I will crowd out the door

And say that I am protecting him from my love

From everything that it is not

I will say: 

A woman betrayed by her own body will never keep any of your secrets

I will say:

Most men are afraid of me, you know?

Or, I will say:

In my culture we do not take our men's names as our own 

You have nothing for me

I have my own name

I know now how this body works

How it will never let a name go until it has taken it into the mouth and fed it to the breath

I still know by heart

The phone numbers of the ones who have lied the most

It was they who I loved best

I let them name me in their language until I forgot every word of my own

Now every mouthful of me is gone

Caught between the teeth of liars

Who hiss when they laugh

And will load a whisper with the kind of spells that could convince a girl that she is nobody's daughter

Or, I will say:

My mother and I are women who look like nobody's wives

The strong girls

Inheritors of every bitterness of a country wrapped by war until it broke itself in half

Through the capered point

Of a horizon line of women who've learned to cook dinner at night whether or not their men come home

Lover, 

The whole world knows the colour of my people's blood

Lover,

I am a girl without a country

Carrier of a nature lost

Lover,

I cannot keep house

I haven't enough language to name a child with

Lover,

Loving you, 

I betray all the left behind women in my blood

I've left my home behind once already

I cannot survive another loss

Or, I will blame my father

I will say:

My father is a backwards glance

My father is a whispered breath

My father is forgotten and I have his face

A skull pierced by the eyes of the man who left makes me the girl who leaves

These are the heirlooms that I've got

My father is a stranger

Every man is a stranger

Once, I let a stranger introduce himself with his hands