We smuggle them quietly into conversations like mistrustful refugees, over state lines and country borders, into friend’s houses where they are whispered into empty wine glasses. Taken and traded, uplifted berated. Strung out and strung together – words, what would you give for them? Your word. Your life.
Our words, wrapped like fine china cloaked in civility - clinking silver on sprig-filled plates shrinking our appetites and starving our conversations. Even the small bites are now hard to swallow.
50 city blocks north or south words fly like bullets punctuating the final end to a conversation dying to be had. The ultimate settling of a score.
Stifled women’s words with no deference to a lived and living life lie somewhere between a cold courtroom’s ruling and a bloody OR.
Threatening words “He’s coming for you.” cryptically written on torn spiral paper left at crowded migrant homes for their children to translate to their mothers and fathers.
While museum halls echo – their memories, relinquished. Words resembling ideals are scraped off the walls of universities, too weak to bear the weight of their meaning.
A rushing river of swirling words caught in between twisted branches and debris catch and slip, pulled down to the bottom. There are no more words.
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