Little Girl Voice - Dereka Meshae Smith

Little Girl Voice
           there is a little girl that lives inside my mouth. 
         she spins stories from the cobwebs
       in the corners of a hushed attic,
her voice a silken thread trailing through the dusky air,
whispering secrets to the dust mites caught in slanting sunbeams.


            in the hollows of my cheeks,
         she builds her fragile palace,
       walls woven from the whispers of forgotten lullabies. a broken ballerina
       music box that plays only when the north wind sighs.
      she dances alone as she always wanted to be a ballerina,
       her feet brushing softly over the tongue,
    an imaginary ballet occurs in the cavern of my throat.

                  her hands craft origami creatures from my fears,
                folded delicately into cranes and tigers
             that roam my molars,
         a menagerie of the mind, fluttering and prowling
         in the verdant underbrush of my wild subconscious thought.

                 she sings a hymn of the haunting,
              the melody rising like a mist,
           notes dripping from my lips
      like condensation on a widow’s window. a
      mist, a canvas for writing a Help sign. The
      cries she lets out come out backwards,
      mistaken for the sound of ecstasy.

               in the cavity of my mouth, her sanctuary,
           where the boiler rumbles with the pressure of untold stories,
        she tends to the fires that never quite extinguish, always smoldering.
      in the marrow of my bones, she inscribes her legacy,
      a script of bone-white ink, invisible yet indelible.


             there is a little girl that lives in my mouth--
          a specter of secrets, a phantom of fragmented pasts,
          and when I speak, it is with her words.
          She is an everlasting whisper in the
​          hallowed halls of this bony labyrinth.