This is my voice, my untrammeled and confused trill of noise. I’ve heard that my voice, my noise, the vibration of my vocal chords is a signifier, but I didn’t say that. The signifier is not mine to name and is not part of my language.
My browned fingers bleed sometimes from washing dishes all day; not the rubbing but the constant soak of soap-filled water splits my skin open. Rubber gloves only last so long, and there are dishes at home as well as at work. I take care not to bleed at work; it is not acceptable. At home dark tendrils drift into the rose colored water and a deep pain afflicts me. Perhaps if I had a gift of words I could name this pain, pen it up in a clear plastic container and prod out its secrets. The eight fifty an hour I make washing dishes in the back of a Mexican fast food chain helps sustains my body and my children, but it only helps.
Watch a drop of blood touch the surface of oily water, watch the red pearl blossom into a crimson flower before the thin gossamer threads of my life drift away. And I pause until the flow of my fingers stems. I watch the seeds of my poverty in the sink of my labor and I feel deep things moving beneath the surface. Of course sadness, pain, anger, and other common words come to mind, but using those words to describe what moves within is like watching my son break out into a boiling fever and calling it “not good.”
The tragedy within, of my downtrodden and broken self, is mine.
I do not have a name for it. Instead others speak for me, wage wars of idealism far above my head and use the deep nameless thing within me like a bludgeon. The poor are a weapon in the hands of the educated, swinging my incomprehensible feelings about and cutting at the opposition who they claim created me. The opposition swings back claiming that their detractors would make beggars of us all. In between the poor suffer and the intellectuals talk about the poor like a Darwinian phenomenon.
The poor are not mine either. I am poor, but I am not the poor. I am mine, and the things I suffer are mine also, and the things I cannot name are mine more than anything.
Except I’ve shown my fraudulence. Remove the words: untrammeled, trill, signifier, tendrils, gossamer, and all words like them. Reduce my words to a rudiment of language that barely resembles the words used in tomes to define our existence and that I did not create. Replace them with silent tears, pain, curses, slang, confusion, outburst of senseless bitterness, and a thousand other manifestations. Then look upon me, upon the things I name with gestures and emotion and leave unnamed by words, and say I’ve brought this upon myself.
These things are mine.
(Fiction by Alexander Pappalardo)
El Portal Literary Journal 