Black on Her Tongue examines how early patterns can shape the course of a life.

 

Formed in the quiet calibrations of childhood: how to stay, to please, to be kept; attachment becomes a hunger unaware of its own risk.

 

When love arrives, fast and absolute, it feels like answer. What follows is a long interior of distortion: language bending, the self reducing, the body holding what the mouth cannot say.

 

These poems move through the entanglement of an abusive relationship, the difficult act of leaving, and the afterlife that persists beyond it. Even in absence, the pattern persists: anxious reach, learned silence, the black residue of memory carried in the mouth.

 

Through charged poetics, the work traces how harm takes hold in what felt like love, and how a voice strains toward its own return.