The Curse of a Quiet Mouth by Selahmon Risingsun Writing & Poetry | Poetry

Photography by Alexander Grey

What happens when silence is inherited as survival? In “The Curse of a Quiet Mouth,” Selahmon Risingsun traces the distance between the girl taught to disappear and the woman who discovers that her voice was never the thing that needed correcting.

I was raised in rooms that never learned my name properly,
where the walls spoke louder than school bells
and my voice grew up barefoot,
untrained in the language of outside air.

My mother did not teach me how to speak like a bridge,
she taught me how to disappear like smoke.

She said: be quiet—
not as rest,
but as survival.
Not as softness,
but as strategy.

She said: don’t talk too much,
you don’t sound right when you do.

So I learned the religion of silence.

I became fluent in swallowing myself whole—
a girl made of unsaid sentences
and lowered eyes.

I thought that was womanhood.
I thought that was safety.

I carried her voice inside my throat
like an inherited spell—
one that turned my words into hesitation
before they ever reached daylight.

And still, my body kept becoming.

Too loud in its curves.
Too honest in its lips.
Too alive to match the story I was given.

She said she wanted daughters small as porcelain,
quiet as kept secrets,
soft as nothing that draws attention.

But I grew anyway.

I grew like rebellion doesn’t ask permission.
Like ancestry doesn’t always agree with itself.

And I remember the first time a stranger
looked at my mouth like it was holy instead of wrong.

A woman with brushes and light said:
why are you hiding this?

And I didn’t know how to answer
because no one had ever asked me
to love what I was told to erase.

That was the day something ancient in me cracked open—
not breaking,
becoming.

I realized then:
some mothers pass down love like medicine,
and some pass down fear like inheritance.

And I am still learning
which parts of me are mine,
and which were just echoes
I was never meant to keep.

But I speak now.

Not to punish her.
Not to erase her.
But to rewrite what silence tried to finish.

Because I was never born to be quiet
just to make someone else comfortable with their pain.

I was born to turn it into language.

— Selahmon Risingsun