Reciting the Vocabulary

by Raluca David

One wall listens, one window does not listen. She

replaces your tongue with a wooden spoon, your words

come out in small clumps. Your Vocabulary is as red as

your Grade Book. You are called to stand up, thin willow.

You recite the memorised words, the archaisms: hobot,

which is bride’s veil, ienicer, which is Ottoman soldier,

vistavoi, which is a Russian soldier. Swiftly you recite the

neologisms: monument, which is monument, from French,

mediatizare, which is to popularise, from English,

combinat, which is where both your grandfathers worked,

combinat, Great Productive Complex Constituting of

Multiple Sectors that Complement Each Other. Combinat,

from Russian.

You try to spit out the wooden spoon, or at least replace it

with a metal spoon, thinner, like the spatula they use to

look down your throat and see all the words you’ve

swallowed, layered like riverbank sediments. That one,

the one you should be ashamed of, Enough, a perverse

word for a pupil; Enough, a word that would slap a

mother-in-law arriving from Russia with all her luggage in

your living room kitchen opening pots what have we. Thin

as the spatula they use to look up your vagina, are you

ripe enough to birth your own baby. Enough is buried with

all the words you’ve swallowed, like that time in Moscow

airport when white-tracksuit mothers yelled at white-

tracksuit sons while the sickle and hammer

faced you, the size of a standing bear.

RALUCA DAVID is a British-Transylvanian writer pursuing an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford. Her fiction won an Andromeda Short Story Prize, was shortlisted for the Oxford-BNU Prize and appeared in The Mays, on East of the Web and in Wellington Square Review. Her non-fiction features in Bluestocking and is forthcoming in Nomadology. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Martin Starkie and Dart Prizes and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition.

Art by Vivien Wu​​​​​​​