His Voice in Mine

Words I promised never to borrow

slip through my teeth like a borrowed coat.

Sharp reprimands cut the quiet hollow,

shadowed echoes in a kitchen remote.

The air thickens—breath caught mid-flight,

my voice cracks, a brittle old song.

I taste the bitter ash of his night,

hear him in me, loud and wrong.

Behind the cold glass, my reflection stares,

a man tangled in lines not his own.

The silence fills the spaces he wears,

and I speak in a voice carved from stone.

I am his voice, unbidden and sharp,

notes in a tune I never could warp.