To Be the Vowel in an Abjad Family

is like being a trombone among tubas, 
trumpets, cornets, and French horns. To be one
paperclip in a box of two-hundred-and-fifty,
a gentle boy forced to play football, or a truth-teller. 
I am the only daughter, a rebel like exiled vowels 
in a consonantal family.  

But today I rhythm down into curious
upon learning the French word for paperclip. Like 
the one I found in the faculty lounge, the one
pulled from a small Staples box, flimsy 
cardboard coffin positioned to be forgotten,
with Le Trombone printed in red.

A child is like a trombone, an instrument 
without valves flapping open and shut. The one
member of a brass family that uses metal slides 
instead to change tune, its U-shaped tubes 
forming an S or fetal coil of possibility 
like a daughter pulling away, fists unclenching.

My late father played the trombone 
for Scranton High’s student orchestra, the one
football player who loved making music 
more than blocking passes or sacking quarterbacks: 
Curious boy running down the shape of 
expectations trying to be more than just tough.

The early trombone was called sackbut,
French for saquer (pull) and bouter (push), its one
repetitive movement to attach and detach.
Like the paperclip, or how siblings extend and slide
into each other’s worlds until torsion
breaks the bonds, dislocates. Reality’s funny

friction fails to hold papers in the mouth 
of a clip. Productivity, portability, and loss are
the metal tongues of language—buzzing lips 
of a mother who still feels small, her mouth 
gripping the brass heart’s-bell rage between never
enough and hazy vibration of half notes

like the paperclip I’ve now untwisted. Or acrobatic 
Hebrew letters in a book on the table, the one
with words right to left for your father 
and fog. Curious why they’re spelled the same 
but only one wears nikud (vowels). 
I ask my Israeli colleague:

How can such different words be clipped 
together? This ancient language is an Abjad, one
whose vowels are discarded, unnecessary
because we Hebrew speakers just know
where the vowels would be. She laughs,  
no one would mistake fog for father. 

Most orchestras seat three trombones 
like my parents’ pit of two sons and me, the one
who’s unclipped from our family, unfolded
and picking locks, reaching hard places. Fog horns 
pull ships to shore while bugles push graveside 
for those left off life’s page, muted. 

An only daughter is the truth-teller, down 
like a family wound, wounded and unwound. 
To be a simple paper clip found is to be 
Le Trombone in red script or a vowel in an abjad 
language, ancient and holy. How so much 
power is found in the small things.