Do You Speak Tagalog? Liaa Fernandez after Kaveh Akbar
I remember learning how to pronounce one of my mother tongues the way my colonizer would English is a language that asks you to close your mouth shrink syllable after syllable until the words only rattle out in the space where tongue collides with the teeth like the sound of a knife grinding on broken glass until every corner of your mouth is cut by the need to survive until you forget the way your mother moved her tongue to form a kundiman to sing you to sleep
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