My Voice Isn’t Ready

by MEA COHEN

My mouth can no longer feel my name in it. To stitch this story together is to cauterize my lips. What precisely happened, years, days, hours ago: a blue night, cut with red. Words are whines, swelling from my throat, hindering expression. “Is that all you can remember” isn’t a question. It’s an illustration of tongue-tipped familiars, snatched by my teeth. My voice isn’t ready to carry this carnal weight. My jaws are resting, clefted apart by slight wind, enough for only necessary breath. Let the mouth do its infantile, dumb appeal for living. Though I am tired of pretending. What is the word for the realization that language can never save you? With my toothbrush, I scrub until maroon flies out of my gums and flows down into the porcelain sink. I dutifully wash it away. I draw breath and exhale. Give up on fitting into language. My teeth are picked clean. I growl at the mirror, and my heavy tongue goes slack. I am weaker than I seem. On the phone, my mother’s voice sings to me. She’s always singing. Her lyrics: “So, how are you?” I don’t sing back, my resolve acute in the locking jaw of the white bathroom. I hang up the phone and stick my fingers down my throat. My vomit is luminous in the toilet bowl. Luminous. My fingers are slick with gag slime. Through each new wound, the body chronicles just how many ways a person can suffer without words.

Ω

Mea Cohen’s work has appeared in The West Trade Review, The Gordon Square Review, OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters, and more. She earned her MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University, where she was a contributing editor for The Southampton Review. She is the founder and editor of The Palisades Review.

Kiera Fisher is a Columbus-based muralist and mixed-media artist who embraces bold, brilliant, and vibrant colors and imagery to create art that makes you think, and makes your inner child jump for joy. She draws inspiration from her surroundings, incorporating lived experiences into her work, which frequently depicts figures and their relationship to people, places, and things. She works with a variety of media and materials, including anything from illustration and textiles to fine arts.