🪆 The Smallest Silence they painted my cheeks with obedient roses and sealed my smile with varnish so it would not tremble I was born hollow— that is to say prepared inside me another girl slept curled like a comma waiting for her sentence winter pressed its bone against the window breathing ferns upon the glass the men drank silence the women stitched it into linen I learned early how to divide myself twist open offer a smaller obedience a smaller heart a smaller room with no door each of us fitting precisely into the wound of the other my mother lived in my ribs her mother in hers a procession of thinning voices stacked like dark teacups after a funeral and here I stand in a corridor of ghosts and toys— Pessoa whispers riddles in ink, his words curling like smoke around my neck Lenin’s marble eyes blink, cold and patient, watching me unfold into nothing Cheburashka tilts its head its mouth whispering conspiracies and a little bird flutters on the edge of my shoulder its tiny claws digging into my varnished skin singing of a world I will never touch sometimes at night when the house forgets its posture I loosen wood sighs against wood and I hear them— the innermost child no larger than a plum stone knocking she has no paint no eyelashes only a pulse thin as a winter star she asks what happens when there is no smaller body left to carry the cold I cannot answer I only close and close again until I am one smooth silence standing, waiting for someone’s careful hands to split me open and count the sadness one by one.
