聲 / Voice
by Helena Tang

To record someone is a small theft of breath,

says a poet I once read. I believed this. It is known a tape

can keep you living in someone else’s mouth.

How it is first to sing at karaoke, my father

hoarding each note on a cheap cassette deck—

flattened, hissed, stripped of the air between syllables.

Each chorus filed in a shoebox of plastic shells.

Reading Barthes, I wonder if the microphone is

a thirsty ear that must drink to remember. My father

records more now—not songs, but speeches:

my grandmother blessing her eldest son at New Year,

her hands folded over a packet of tea leaves.

The echo of her cough, the rustle of paper.

There’s a tape of her naming every cousin

in the family, pausing to laugh at her own mistakes,

a fragment I rewind as I enter her empty house,

my recorder the only machine that can keep her.