‘Dead Languages’
— Hannah Cohen
He sketched me
as Joan of Arc & I laid down
What is communication but the building of bridges and burning them? Can a word ever truly die, even if it’s not actually spoken? Consider this question when reading ‘Dead Languages’. The poem’s setting is over a Scrabble game—a distracted, tense game in which the “board between [them]” emphasizes the speaker’s troubled attachment to “him”.
There’s a tug and pull in this piece that’s reflected in the indented couplets of every other stanza, how the flow of sentences like “He played in pronouns. / I spelled lozenge. I spelled nox” gives you an exact picture of their struggle. Really, the crux of this poem lies in this telling moment:
I laid down
every beautiful thing to exist
in words. He said, I see.
He didn’t.
Even if we say the exact same mundane words like “cat” or “home” to each another every day, we never fully understand it. Someone else’s “cat” word is different than yours or mine. Is power and conflict inexplicably tied to our words? I don’t know. In the end, our languages “[fight] to win…like / animals at their bits”.