The voice in the room

She smiles at us from across the table,

as she tells us how she was taught to speak,

softer 

and lesser

and how the sound of a girl should feel like the pink petal taste of sweet berries.

Her voice is the first thing I noticed about her.

The second was the way she delicately weaves apology between the threads of her words,

and spills sorry,

Like a dish on her tongue, she's always ready to serve.

I never saw her scream.

She explains how the last time
she drank the waters she was not supposed to,

it seared her whole throat.

She couldn't speak anything for days.

How are you to project the noise of the wars within you

when you were not given a voice, to begin with?

I think of all the times

I've bit my tongue and kept the words behind the prison of my lips,

I wonder if that's the reason I hide avalanches of destruction behind contorted metaphors inked beautifully on paper.

Is there an act more violent than burying your own voice?

At the dinner table,

the guy next to me jokes,

says how girls are like plates,

flat and useless.

Words of rage strike the roof of my mouth

as I shout,

and stop before I should've.

He smiles,

and my throat burns like a smoldering candle.

How many words can you throw at the universe

before it's too much?

How loud does your voice have to be

before it can finally be heard?