The Story of My Alphabet
By Charlee Brooks
Published 12 August 2025
The alphabet is made of twenty-six letters. And what about the tongue? Well, it is a muscular organ. I wish I knew how to play the organ. Covered in mucus and papillae.
What else is true? Where do you come from? I come from the blue.
This doesn’t come from my tongue, but somewhere else. Why blue? Organs prying. The four letters my sister stained across my metatarsals. An extension of limbs that aren’t mine, but I use to create things.
Because Blue is the terrestrial paradise in which man bathes.[1]
Fluorescent and wet. No room for gender. The queens at the sink and a slash of red lipstick. An empire of bodies. Yours and mine, and a stall three doors from the left. Gorgeous, gorgeous bodies. Tossing language around in bedding, in limbs and leaving it out to dry. Semantics. All of it. Fucking the moon. Fucking the sun.
The question of the alphabet—I’m sorry. Organs too loud. I wish I knew what you meant when you asked. I’d give it up if I had the answer. I swear. I could reach into your mouth and paint each letter. Large strokes against you, carnivorous and delicious.
In tongues. We thrash around in the dark. The effort of speaking human. Translation. Do you know what I mean? Or are we lost? Drowning in blue. In heat. In tinnitus. Sucking old wounds and edges of skin with no turgor left.
A hypersonic tongue. A whip well well-trained. The sound of my tear ducts and bloody teeth. Do you want our meanings to rub against each other? To kiss on the way down? Let the phonetics fill your ears and dance for me darling.
Write an ode to the mouth, to the tongue, to language.
Charlee Brooks
#30in30 writing prompt
For so long, I lacked language. Not in the sense of pronunciation or comprehension, but in the deeper sense of articulation. Growing up queer and lost, language felt almost impossible to me.
But as I grew into adulthood, something shifted. Language, especially in the vessel poetry provides began to fascinate me. Poetry taught me to love the liminal space of meaning: how words kiss, rub up against each other, and land not just in my own ears, but in the ears of others.
Poetry gives me the freedom to write from my body, to dance with my tongue. I used to be afraid of that, afraid that my truth would rub up against someone else’s, afraid of the friction. Poetry lets me live in that in-between space. It gives me room to exist.
And as a queer person, that feels radical. Poetry permits me to dance: with words, with sound, with my body.
