MCLORD SELASI

What Is the Word for Losing a Language?

My mother keeps her language in the third drawer, beneath the wax prints, beneath the receipts

from a Beirut she has never seen, beneath the wedding photograph where my father is still

pretending he will live forever. She speaks Eʋe the way other women carry small bones in their

pockets—for luck, for company, for the next time someone tries to take them apart with a question.

When I ask her to teach me a word, she gives me the word for hunger, then the word for the bowl

that knows it, then the word for the spoon that has stopped pretending it is a tool. I write each one

in the margin of a notebook my American teacher will not read.

At night, my mother dreams in a country I cannot enter without papers. She wakes with the syllables

caught in her throat like fish that have forgotten how to be eaten.

When she dies—forgive me, this is the only tense I know how to grieve in— I will inherit the

drawer & not the language. The drawer will smell of camphor & a war that took place when she was

four. I will press my face to it & try to learn a vowel by smell.

What is the word, Ma, for the son who returns only in English? What is the word for the hand that

opens the drawer & closes it & opens it & closes it & is still a hand?

McLord Selasi is a Ghanaian writer, poet, and performing artist. His work has appeared in Panorama, Apricot Press, The Shallow Tales Review, Shoegaze Literary, Trampoline, Rough Diamond, Isele Magazine, Subliminal Surgery, Eunoia Review, Poetry Journal, and Graveside Press, among others.