Dead Languages

My mother mutters in tongues under her breath,

scraping into the trash what we couldn’t clean

from our plates. In the living room, my grandmother

stubs her toe & hollers out a dark angelic curse. They say

a language dies every two weeks.

In the forest, the ornithologist sings

the songs of extinct birds: pagan reed-warbler,

honeycreeper, the bishop’s oo. Every year,

the children’s dictionary kicks more words out of its house:

Pansy. Adder. Sin. At the youth homeless mission,

the old prophet teethes new words for the boys

to gnash into a prayer. Chanting off-key scriptures

across town, the deacon tongues whatever dead

languages he can back to life. Silence has wolfed

his toddler down whole, the boy’s voice

a lightning bug caught in a jar. The last angel

sits on the counter after church & hums along

with my mother’s hymns. Our dishes clink softly

in the sink. A soap bubble, set loose, whispers up

into the unforgiving air. New words

birthed by the dictionary the year I was born

included genomics, degenderize, deathcare,

& anti-HIV. They came out ugly & wet, clumsy

as a newborn horse. Behind my mother’s back,

the angel is fading out, diffusing

into the junk mail & clutter, leaving everything

humming. The bubble quivers up, impossibly

up, floating out the window & beyond my mother’s

outstretched finger. Slit open by a broken

dish, it turns the sink water red as a plague,

a miracle. Wine-red stains blotched on her apron,

she blurts out something between a curse & a prayer.