Echo’s Lament by Logan Stallings

If I could speak I would say
Zeus, didn’t you know?

When you came to me, how could I refuse you
the king? You said as much

And when your wife found us, she

wanted your blood, to run with the streams and turn
my sisters’ baths red, but you

gave her my blood instead
It wasn’t my blood she wanted

but she cursed me nonetheless, and she
made me a beast of wordless suppression

No censorship or empathy to be had

because my words were mine no longer
The door was ripped clean off my mouth

Rusty hinges on my lips
remain but do nothing to stop

the words of vile men
words ill-fitting in my mouth

that have no place on my lips
but now I spew them ceaselessly
It hurts like swallowing glass

This repetition, this vocal fry
My vocabulary the careless offhand words of others

What a horrible thing to do to a woman
by a woman

to make her the girl with no door on her mouth
the girl cursed to lament in this

cruel alien diction. No empathy
for me was spared

My sword my shield my words are gone
my pauses my breaths my commas my colons they have left me

It seems I reside in some
lonely wolfthicket

No screams of my own will escape these lips
but in a way, Dear Zeus

I am freed from the censorship

Oh, Lover
I don’t have the words

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Logan Stallings is a graduate of St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas where she majored in English Writing and Rhetoric with a concentration in Creative Writing. For the academic year of 2019-2020, Logan is completing her Fulbright grant working as an English Teaching Assistant in the Czech Republic. Her writing has been featured in journals such as Soren Oak Review and Arete.

Photo: Cristian Newman