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When you moved

to the U.S. in 2002,

your parents first introduced you to English

piece by piece, little airplanes of words, then phrases, then sentences

fed to you by the spoonful until one meal turned

to tens, turned

to hundreds by the time

you naturalized into the elementary school

classrooms with white teachers and white friends and other friends of color

who experienced the same test for belonging. Then,

the accumulating absence of Tagalog

until it became as good

as nothing.

What was this lack

if not a sacrifice made to hustle with the cool

kids in grade school who were rich or religious or radiant with personality,

to hang with the gleeful infection of them

and their American sayings that had no room for the few Tagalog words

you barely recollected like bukás and búkas. To which

they said the first syllable sounds like poo,

like your native language

is shit,

is sorrowful,

is a slang that is unwelcome

here. Hear the strong English that could vouch

for your skin because the vocabulary

is valuable,

is vindicated,

is revolutionary. This, you learned,

was the harness, the holler for affinity. Just you, them,

and all this lingo. All the jargon

of your parents’ American

dream.

[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry

Sound Bites from the Language of Silence

by JP Legarte

In the Philippines,

how easy it is for you to trick your silent tongue,

to convince it that

staying mute is better than trying to articulate flawed

Tagalog as a rite of passage

to family.

To strangers.

To the neighbors who look

at you like you’re the American sore spot

on this block. Tally the rhetoric

stretched in anguish

over slow syllables. The lexicon

ensconced in disharmonic cadence. What

expression should supplement

the fundamental

Salamat po

for Lolo, who woke from a dream hours before the wailing

roosters, perused the few open bakeries nearby, purchased excess pandesal at four a.m.

the day you were to leave Batangas, fly back to America,

because he remembered the pandesal

here is your favorite,

incomparable to the white

bread in the U.S.? Answer: the sad hum

in your stomach

succumbed to this smell of fresh yeast. This spare utterance

you give with your mouth

primed to devour manners, unfit to speak any sentence

except Salamat po.

Except this basic thanks

that shows how little

you know of Tagalog when isolated

from the safety of English. Did you already forget

just how fast a language can dissolve

if not practiced outside

your quiet

thoughts?

[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry

Sound Bites from the Language of Silence

by JP Legarte

During Rosetta Stone

Tagalog lessons in high school, you got used

to every voice in the computer lab

repeating each unfamiliar

word, phrase, and sentence enunciated by the program

as if a long-lost song of Babel.

Every voice

except yours. Your voice

sounding more like undecipherable

noise. Like the choice

to be quieter.

Like when you spoke the predictable

Salamat po

to Lolo. How wrong

the application’s descending tritone felt

when the error of your pronunciation proved enough. When the difference between

Ano ang bukás? and Ano ang búkas? is the difference between

What is open? and What is tomorrow?

And the correct response to those questions is not your lips

because you don’t question how

you got to this point, why

it was not your speech tutoring them, how

you wanted teachers to comment, I think your English is stunning. I think.

Your English is stunning. I think your English—it’s stunning—until you heard it said too much. Until you refused

to be better. To be expert—which is to mean family and friend and fellow Filipino

to those back in the Philippines—

and not expat. Not battlefield of languages. Not object of your peers’

confused glares as if your face were a copy

of each red x on the screen. If only

you could barter this hurt,

exchange a sentence of English in the belly for even

a fragment of Tagalog. If only

communication worked

as simply

as that.

[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry

Sound Bites from the Language of Silence

by JP Legarte

[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry

You know better

than anyone

how the lack of communication contains

its own inevitable

consequence. Before you ever managed

a full conversation in Tagalog with him, Lolo succumbed to lung

cancer, frail in the frame of that final

Facetime. Despite all those Rosetta Stone Tagalog lessons. Despite the extra practice and study

you knew deep down was never enough to turn back the time

from that moment. His body a solid lump

of shadowed, sharp

bone under white blanket. His mouth

opened to a thinned zero

as if to say, You are too late.

As if to interrogate with Why

didn’t you open your mouth to Tagalog sooner? How

did “I’ll practice it more tomorrow” become years of hesitation, become me on this death-

bed and you miles and miles away across oceans?

How to tell him

you don’t know, you have no answer,

except to convey the usual silence through closed lips as the sunlight

split his mouth into a dying

bloom. The tongue a curdled, pink petal, the last attached to the stem of his breath

before Lola adjusted his skinny pillow, a shrill wheeze besieging

the tempo of his chest. After the missing dialogue,

the next time you saw him

was not tomorrow

but the wide confines of the cemetery, the mossy

headstones sobered by the return of sunlight. Haunting, isn’t it? This

cursed memory of how your unopened mouth held a better conversation with him dead at his grave

than when he was alive. How no fundamental

Salamat po

or knowing the difference between bukás and búkas will save you now. All because

you found more fluency in a vocabulary not named

English or Tagalog—the dialect

of the dead, this language

of silence.

Sound Bites from the Language of Silence

by JP Legarte

JP Legarte (he/she/they) is a genderfluid Filipinx American graduate student at Emerson College in Boston pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry). He also serves as a senior editor and the Community and Grant Development Assistant for Brink Literacy Project and F(r)iction, as a senior poetry reader and the Digital Director for Redivider, and as the Director of Creative Operations for Collections of Transience. Her poem "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" was chosen for the 2025 Mayor’s Poetry Program in Boston. Their other honors include being a 2025 Juniper Summer Writing Institute full scholarship recipient, a 2025 Lit Fest Emerging Writer Fellowship in Poetry finalist with Lighthouse Writers Workshop, first place winner for the 2024 Leonard A. Slade Jr. Poetry Fellowship with the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and a 2023 Jack McCarthy Book Prize finalist with Write Bloody Publishing.

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