by Rachel Lachmansingh
how to find a language how to find your ancestors how to know if they
watch over you how to open your mouth and find your mother’s father’s
mother’s mother’s tongue how to sharpen your voice how to sharpen a
knife how to know if you’ve been lhykonoan how to know what that
means how to mean you want to carve your mother’s father’s mother’s
mother out of cassava and beg her to teach you the way of her jaw how
to open your foreign throat how to open a woman down the middle and
hope she spills a tybontoan where your mother’s father’s mother’s
mother emerges how to take her hand as she shows you how to make
khale with closed eyes how to tell her you want to say I love you but
don’t know her mother’s father’s mother’s mother’s mother language
how to say more than the ten words the internet provided you how to
say I want to find you by the water how to say let’s touch shoulders and
skip stones between threads of asa like steely parentheses gliding over
and over how to dream of your mother’s father’s mother’s mother how
to dream of your bloodline breeching air like a cottonwood’s branches
how to dive into your hollow diaspora toward her how to swim to her
through suspended coast and hook your pinkies together until the hadali
dissolves from the sky and kathi replaces it as words do; one after the
other.
RACHEL LACHMANSINGH is a Guyanese-Canadian writer from Toronto. Her writing has been considered for various awards and has appeared or is forthcoming in Minola Review, Grain Magazine, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, CV2, and a previous issue of Augur Magazine. She is currently pursuing her BA in creative writing.
at night, i rest my limbs in water and search for my mother’s father’s mother’s mother’s tongue can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 5.1.
