Ventriloquist Lips
Location
Honey
it takes miles to smile with a mouth like yours
if you let it run it’ll never stop
salivating all the tears you’ve let cultivate
at the shriveled root of your unused tongue if you ever had one
I ironed it out into leather so that you could have a jacket to keep you safe from the
cold breaths circulated at seemingly warm dinner tables
where people hung like burning tea
on sewn lips
stung talk in their heat
your words curdled into euphemism
too engrossed in preaching properness to notice that you were becoming
property.
your teeth were grooveless
flat
never quite clicked together
I could see the awkward angle they made in your jaws
I tried bringing myself to ask the dentist to adjust them but couldn’t,
I envied
that he was the only person to ever observe the mechanical of your throat
abyss
one day you didn’t smile
but when you did I wanted you to stop because
you looked like you were in pain
like the dentist forgot you were human for a moment
stretched your jaws
too wide
too far
let them bleed
‘til your corpse became paler than pale, a
husk of a husk,
didn’t know there could be an emptiness to emptiness
Nights I’d see you sneak a spoonful of wishful thinking
just to satisfy anorexic vocal chords
maybe to compensate for something you lost from there a while ago
and later wrote out on your skin in horizontal “I’s”
physically verbalizing
to remind yourself that one day “I” could get up
could unlace your mouth
without having to draw a vertical
“I”
will not let you hoard your stories
thoughts
‘til they seep out the pores of your skin in
Brands
‘til they fit the slits on your
Wrists
‘til they leak out the corners of
Eyes that cried wax
teared candlewick that smoothed over your fractured porcelain faces
so that people could silently light their prayers on your eyelashes—
your dimples were my duvets,
I could rest on them believing you were happy,
at least—that’s what the mirror told me alone
in our reflection.