Something is different
My mouth tastes like rain

I woke before the morning birds
with little words behind my teeth
They moved like insects in the dark,
too soft for me to understand

I tried to say my morning prayer
Another sound came out instead
It curled around my tongue so slowly,
warm and strange and almost sweet

I didn't know that word

Again
Please...
say it again

They speak through my teeth
They breathe through my mouth
Little voices rising
from somewhere further down

My tongue is not mine
My breath is not mine
Oh, how blessed I must be
if they have chosen somewhere inside me to hide

Not mine...
Not mine...
How lovely
Not mine...
Not mine...

Sometimes my jaw begins to move
before I know I want to speak
Sometimes my lips make little shapes
I never learned as a child
Sometimes I wake with mud beneath
the edges of my fingernails
Sometimes there are leaves beside me
though I slept behind the shrine

Did I walk outside?
No...
Maybe something walked in

There is a pressure in my chest
Not pain
Not quite
More like a hand
pressed gently from within

It rises when the rain begins
It trembles when the insects sing
It wakes whenever something dies
It smiles when roots touch buried bone

I think it knows them

My hands know things
I never taught them
My feet remember
paths I've never walked
My mouth remembers
names I've never heard
My blood remembers...

I don't know what

They speak through my teeth
They breathe through my mouth
Many little voices
are learning how I sound

My tongue is not mine
My breath is not mine
Oh, how blessed I must be
Take every empty place in me
There is room

When I was little,
I thought my body
was the one thing
that belonged to me

My hands
My eyes
My voice
My name
Such tiny possessions

How silly

The rain does not own the water
The tree does not own the leaf
The earth does not own the body
sleeping underneath

So why should I own
this little mouth?
Why should I keep
this little breath?
If a god needs somewhere warm to speak...

it can have mine

Open
I'm open
Tongue
Teeth
Throat
Breath
Blood
Bone

Come closer
Closer
Closer

I can hear you now
We can hear you too
...we?

Something laughs behind my tongue
Something weeps behind my eyes
Something older than my mother
knows exactly how to breathe

I do not know where I have gone
I do not think that I am lost
There is simply less of me
and more of everything

They speak through my teeth
They breathe through my mouth
Every little opening
is letting something out

My tongue is not mine
My breath is not mine
And I have never felt so full

Take my voice
Take my silence
Take the spaces in between

Speak through me
Sing through me
Dream through me
I will listen

Can you hear them now?
Can you hear us?
Can you hear...

I can

Good