Late Alphabet

by Philip Nikolayev

Your textbook opening like a hefty door into bad weather,
the first greeting hits you sideways, a consonant crosswind.
Your tongue, born and trained elsewhere, slips on this new
pavement, coughing up a sound that’s neither theirs nor yours.
The room smiles politely. You file the sound under “wound”
and plod on, each verb a steep hill with a different gravitational
pull on every slope. You climb in the wrong tense, slide back
a decade, start again. Your lungs mistime the pauses, arrive
gasping at the period. The teacher draws an invisible map
on the air and your lips try to follow its rivers. A lost vowel
glows under the scar tissue of your mother tongue. You dig for it,
trying to use your uvula as the shovel, where younger lips
juggle these phonemes like bright plastic toys. The rusty gears
in your jaw grind, old habits resisting demolition. Nonetheless,
something within you loves this ache that spells expansion.
You realize a new language is not a code but a choreography
of flesh. Each successful sentence leaves a faint electric trail
along your nerves and you go home with only eight new words,
but they glow like distant cities at night. You whisper them until
they stop flinching, until they line up in a row and answer you.
As you try to translate “effort is not a tunnel but a climate,”
your ribs internalize the heaving rhythm of this thin, high air.
What once scraped you raw now clarifies for you your being here
and it slowly it dawns on you you’re not reaching for worlds
but fiercely carving out a lucid space your life can stand in.