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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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Poem Through a Dictionary

By Gayatri Rajan

It matters how you name a thing.

Last week, a teacher called school shootings

unlikely threats, and I shivered like a bullet

through air. The men on TV said casualties instead of murders. Look

at the language we have torn

from our language. In the language of this country, Mother,

I am a dependent, you an alien,

our threat neutralized. In the language of this country,

we are potential homegrown threats; we are denaturalized;

we are possible detainees.

My father is fluent in three languages. I am illiterate

in the languages of my father. When I go to the airport,

they check my luggage three times. When you got pulled over,

I couldn’t breathe. Mother, I still haven’t learned

my names. Mother, last week I read every page of the ICE dictionary

and I still don’t know what alien means.

I am tired of names. Let them slip away from us

like skin. Maybe this is what we were born for,

this breathless living. Let me give these words eyes, mouths,

hearts, every syllable shivering with heat,

an impossible pulse. Let me set fire to the old words, vowels

swallowing themselves in seconds.

Let me name everything anew.

 

Gayatri Rajan is a poet from Andover, MA. Her work has been featured by Eunoia Review, Write the World, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, Creative Minds Imagine, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, she’s browsing cat pictures, hanging out with her little sister, overthinking, and drinking way too much tea.

 

 

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Issue Seventeen

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