My mother mutters in tongues under her breath,
scraping into the trash what we couldn’t clean
from our plates. In the living room, my grandmother
stubs her toe & hollers out a dark angelic curse. They say
~
a language dies every two weeks.
In the forest, the ornithologist sings
the songs of extinct birds: pagan reed-warbler,
honeycreeper, the bishop’s oo. Every year,
~
the children’s dictionary kicks more words out of its house:
Pansy. Adder. Sin. At the youth homeless mission,
the old prophet teethes new words for the boys
to gnash into a prayer. Chanting off-key scriptures
~
across town, the deacon tongues whatever dead
languages he can back to life. Silence has wolfed
his toddler down whole, the boy’s voice
a lightning bug caught in a jar. The last angel
~
sits on the counter after church & hums along
with my mother’s hymns. Our dishes clink softly
in the sink. A soap bubble, set loose, whispers up
into the unforgiving air. New words
~
birthed by the dictionary the year I was born
included genomics, degenderize, deathcare,
& anti-HIV. They came out ugly & wet, clumsy
as a newborn horse. Behind my mother’s back,
~
the angel is fading out, diffusing
into the junk mail & clutter, leaving everything
humming. The bubble quivers up, impossibly
up, floating out the window & beyond my mother’s
~
outstretched finger. Slit open by a broken
dish, it turns the sink water red as a plague,
a miracle. Wine-red stains blotched on her apron,
she blurts out something between a curse & a prayer.