What Happens
by Lee Varon
Kam Killsfirst is studying Comanche at Comanche Nation College. Only 25 people nationwide speak Comanche, down from about 15,000 in the late 1800s.
What happens when a language slowly dies?
Is love spoken differently?
Hate?
Does the blue bowl shining on a table shine differently?
Or simply disappear?
I heard in Mexico there are only two people alive
who speak Ayapaneco, The True Voice,
and they’re not speaking to each other.
What disappears in the space between them
besides sunflower stalks and evening’s gray moths?
There are different ways to say Death:
All are permanent.
Lee Varon is a poetry, fiction and non-fiction writer. She won the 19th Annual “Briar Cliff Review” Fiction contest. Her poetry and short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in various journals including Painted Bride Quarterly and Atlanta Review. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Affairs Run in the Family. In 2018 she won the Sunshot Poetry Prize for her book, Shot in the Head. She is the co-editor of the anthology Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness, published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2018.