Every Noun Is Already Plural

A Poem by Radikha Freya Anjani

There are no first words

Only words
that have forgotten
how many mouths
they have already survived

The dictionary pretends
each word has
an origin

I don’t believe it

I have watched language
behave more like water
than history;

it remembers its direction
without remembering
its source

Perhaps that is why
cities are impossible
to own

You inherit
the way someone whistles
for the bus

You inherit
the pause
before crossing a road

You inherit
the invisible geometry
that teaches strangers
how not to collide

Long before
you understand a sentence,

your body
has already become fluent

The feet know

The shoulders know

The hand reaching
to hold a train door
for someone
you will never see again knows

Grammar comes later

I used to think
a language
was made of nouns

Table

Window

River

Mother

But nouns
are poor historians

They isolate
what has never existed
alone

There has never been
a river

without the mouths
that named it

Never a city

without the countless
mispronunciations
that slowly became
its accent

Never a self
without the strangers
quietly editing
its edges

Even my handwriting

contains people
I have forgotten

Teachers

Cashiers

The friend
whose grocery list
I copied once
without thinking

The poet
whose cadence
hid itself
inside my pulse
years before
I knew her name

This is how inheritance works

Not by blood

By repetition

A phrase
passes between us
often enough

and one day

it no longer belongs
to anyone

Perhaps this is
what literature
has been trying
to imitate all along

Not permanence,

but circulation

Not authorship,

but weather

To write

is merely

to become

another brief climate

through which
language passes,

changing shape,

remaining itself

So no, there are no first words

Only the impossible tenderness

of believing,

for one miraculous instant,

that the mouth

they happened to choose

was yours