Lingua Franca -

Here’s a short piece titled — written as a reflective prose poem. Lingua Franca

It is imperfect by design: verbs stripped of their subjunctive dreams, nouns abandoned in the wrong gender, accents smoothed down like stones in a river. lingua franca

It is not beautiful, not in the way Italian is beautiful, or the precise cruelty of German, or the musical lilt of Yoruba. Here’s a short piece titled — written as

Its beauty is utility: a rope bridge over a gorge, a splint on a broken leg, a key that turns in a hundred different locks, none of them its own. Its beauty is utility: a rope bridge over

And maybe that is enough. Because before poetry, before prayer, before the love letter and the curse, there was this: two people, no shared cradle, and the desperate, generous act of making meaning anyway.

Lingua franca is the tongue of the in-between — the airport lounge, the trade route, the broken elevator, the help desk at three a.m., the peace treaty signed in a borrowed alphabet.