i know that if you said my name the way you used to i would answer in a language i've told everyone i no longer speak / i know i would say i've forgotten it / and the lie would come out fluent / because i never forgot anything / i only stopped practising / i let the words go soft in my mouth / let the verbs lose their endings / i stopped saying love and started saying something like it / something with the same number of letters / i let us become a thing i could only manage in translation / and when it was finally too foreign to use i called it dead and i buried it and i told the room i'd learned to live in silence / but i dream in it still / whole nights of it / grammar i never studied and cannot explain / so if you stood in front of me tomorrow and said one word of it / one / the silence i built would come apart like wet paper / because here is the truth i keep under my tongue / i don't know how to be a person who never spoke it / i don't know how to hear it in a stranger's mouth and feel nothing / even the flinch is fluency / so maybe what i'm asking is / come and say it once / say it badly / say it in the past tense if you have to / i only need to hear it to know whether i can answer / and i think i need to hear it to learn how not to