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mouth words

She was washing dishes.
She felt sick. She sat down at the kitchen table.
Her mouth was swollen. She felt something in her throat.
She couldn’t swallow.

She put her fingers in her mouth. She began to peel off pieces of skin from the lining of her cheek, from the roof of her mouth, from underneath her tongue.

Each piece of skin was a word. They peeled away easily. She smoothed each word out onto the tabletop:

     daughter
     sister
     mother
     wife
     lawyer
     artist
     friend
     colleague
     lover

Each word was translucent, pink with blood. They were all common nouns. They dried out quickly, shrinking and wrinkling up like tissue paper. They blew away.

She felt other words in her mouth. She winced as she removed them. She plucked each one out with a sense of obsession and relief and laid it on the table:

     white
     middle class
     privileged
     educated
     intelligent
     tactful
     charming
     proper
     polite
     professional
     pragmatic
     organized
     efficient
     articulate
     competent
     loving
     giving
     nurturing
     sexy
     feminine

These words were thicker. When they dried they became stiff and opaque like vellum. She noted that each word was an adjective. She gathered them up in alphabetical order.

She wiped off the table. She felt more words forming in her mouth, hardening, turning to lumps. They were leeches, blood soaked and swollen, embedded in her cheeks, her throat. She had to twist each one round before it would loosen. She persisted in spite of the pain. She dropped each word on the table:

     lazy
     indulgent
     frivolous
     fat
     glutton
     debtor
     bitch
     cunt
     naive
     impractical
     crazy
     frigid
     whore
     good girl
     bad girl
     guilty
     fool
     failure
     selfish
     slut
     demanding
     insatiable
     cold
     smothering
     faithless
     disloyal
     consuming
     humorless
     bitter
     irrational
     hysterical
     female

They were nouns and adjectives. She couldn’t order them. They clotted and stuck to the table. They stained the wood. She scraped them off and put them down the garbage disposal. Her mouth bled every time she opened it to speak. She tried to soothe it with tapioca pudding.

She felt sick to her stomach. She had to hold her knees to her chest. She felt a mass forming in her throat. She opened her mouth. It took both her hands to pull it all out. It smelled like feces, like vomit, like champagne, like semen. It was composed of words, each voicing itself at once.

She recognized some of the words: no, I can’t, I won’t, I want, I am. The mass of words pulsed and bled. She wrapped it in a towel and cradled it against her breast until it was quiet. Then she buried it in the garden, underneath the rose bushes.

She went back into the kitchen to do the dishes. Her throat was raw but she opened her mouth to try to speak. Her words were bubbles. They floated, expanded, enveloped her. She moved within them and through them:

     woman
     human
     sentient
     being
     connection
     time

Elizabeth Ingraham 
eingraham2 [at] unl.edu

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