What Secrets We Keep

For so many years I’ve held words beneath my tongue

like I ’m scared of letting them go.

Here is a collection of the white-lies, the half-truths, the

promises and the parentheses and the half-wishes on the half-

stars and the letters that I thought I had thrown out, but remained

anyways, in the back of my throat. Here is when I didn’t tell you

that I loved you, and here is when I didn’t tell you that I unloved

you. Here’s all of it, folded neatly,

so bitter and so sweet

that my taste buds are revolting against me.

I have memorized the bones of an animal’s body. I’ve

learned that the lower jaws of snakes unhinge so that they can keep

daring one another to eat larger and larger animals.

Sheep. Doe-eyed children. Foxes

with silver tails. A mountain lion cub: paws and whiskers

and all.

I learned how you can see the bulge of their bodies, how it can

take weeks and days for the animals to be digested, for the snake

to be just a snake once more.

But humans are told that we have faster metabolisms, that our bodies

can handle the things that we put inside of it. Everything leaves

before it hurts us too bad. Cigarettes. Meat.

Love.

Heat.

Everything, but words.

Words that

rot beneath my tongue, words that keep coming up

again like cud, that I can no longer hold onto without

my jaws unhinging——with vocabulary the size of elephants

and confessions the length of giraffe’s necks breaking

every bone in my body as they resurface. Words that have broken

through every one of my teeth to find you, again, because

the truth is sinking its fangs into my tongue and

my body is begging for me to open up,

to let the poor

animals go unharmed.