Blood-soaked English, the dumb belle of the ball
in the ballroom of languages, even brutal
when appropriating words from other tongues.
For example, we choose to keep vagina
from Latin though it means sheath,
and constantly misuse it: our vaginas don’t bleed,
you numbskulls, our uteri do. You can’t see
a vagina anymore than you can see your larynx–
it’s inside, not out. The expressions are sanguine
but gangrenous, too, encrusted with origin stories
each more execrable than the last: Rule of Thumb.
Chop-chop. Knocked up. We cannot resist a travel
destination where everyone’s tongue bleeds colonies,
incandescence extinguished by halitosis and gaslights.
Denise Alden holds a masters in nursing, and some of her work can be found at Full House Literary Magazine; in Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic; and at The Sunlight Press. She lives on the traditional homelands of the Dakotah, now known as the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
