my voice

Can you hear my voice?

Is my voice, the voice you are hearing?

My voice which fills this room

And sometimes still doesn’t have room for me.

This voice belongs to my my feminine job

Of herding a classroom of middle schoolers.

It is booming like my father’s,

Crafted like Zeus’s thunderbolts,

Made to scare children and dogs.

So we all scamper under my bed,

And we cry

Because one day we will be storm giants ourselves,

Covered in hair and

Terrifying the masses.

And when I speak like a mother

To my children, holding back the giants in the sky,

I tell them they’re safe, a cozy lie. 

It is my voice, not my words, that soothes them.

It is my voice that gets quieter

When I go out in public

So it matches my dress.

It is my voice that tells the dog to

Stop pissing on the rug!

It is my voice that whispers

To my lover and tells her

That I am always the same.

I am always one voice

Lost under all these other voices.

My voice sounds the same on every piece of paper

And that’s the way I like it best. 

But to live a full life as myself, 

I have become an obsessive scholar, 

Activist, and victim of voices - 

Pitch and resonance

Breathiness, chest voice, nasal voice

Cadence, rhythm, upturn at the end - 

All to make somebody comfortable

Who is not me