Student Poem

SHUSH By Deyvika Rajni Srinivasa, Grade X11 IB Bangalore International School

My parents said there was one golden rule Not to be broken at home or at school: ‘There are some things we just can’t talk about’

You see, my father was a wordsmith and my mother a liar and they named ‘Euph’ short for euphemism

They didn’t keep my superpower a secret for long And began training me to control language to prevent me from doing things wrong

They taught me how to contain my anger in tiny, tasteful jars And soon felt comfortable stitching pillows and quilts out of insults, weaving ‘senior’ into ‘golden years’, ‘awkward af’ into ‘kinda shy’, ‘unattractive’ into “you have a great personality’

I’ve now come to realise I take after my mother’s traits constantly exchanging assonance for consonance, silence for words distorting the sharp Ss and Vs (the sounds we fear to say) for softer ones that keep our monsters at bay As a child I learnt how to steal stealthily slicing open reality until it was unrecognisable and then hiding all the Band-Aids and Neosporin in the world so that it was unfixable…….

And now I’m an unintentional, irreversible kleptomaniac- I snatch the world’s sorrow and crumble it to emptiness I swap our fairness obsession with a snapchat beauty filter A skeleton of a refugee child with ‘politics’ Homophobia with the cross on a shiny silver necklace

I have learnt to play ‘language interpreter’, murdering the meaning of silence and assuming it translates to yes although victim and violence are not the dialects I know best Cooling rape to a tall drink of marriage Bloodshed and brutality to the ringing of patriotic bells Suffocating oceans to progress Melanin gun shots to safety

And finally our tongues are raw and bleeding from biting them so hard for so long And my arms are tired for holding them in place And all these words are floating, lost in translation, polished and meaningless and glimmering, and there is nothing left to say at all.

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