i.
My tongue is on the verge of falling off.
Blackened and blue, soaked in some sort of ice bath,
my tongue is drowning in a pathetic stutter. Too much acid.
ii.
I wonder how my tongue will feel outside my mouth.
Will the nerves still talk to each other,
writhe long after it’s butchered
like the tale of a small lizard?
If I yank my tongue out with my own bare hands
clench it between spit fists,
will it still plead on, beg for my forgiveness?
iii.
When my tongue was Chinese,
I spent 8 years in a room
massaging ulcers with oils and
leaving a trail of saliva over characters.
Mother teacher stood behind me,
top to bottom, left to right,
hold my tongue like a brush over ink.
iv.
My tongue was young once.
In the mirror each night, like a dentist
I would pry my mouth into an O,
carve my tongue until R’s rolled
and Connecticut sounded like Connecticut.
I hoped to become a poet. How silly.
There are some things in Mandarin you can’t translate to English.
v.
Mother says that grandfather was a calligrapher.
His tongue was rough, true, a thing of oracle bones,
plummeting boulders, swimming geese.
When I walk through the streets of Chengdu in my
American tongue, sad, sad, wretched, moving, ungracious tongue,
I cannot tell—
vi.
when the river flows
and ends.
Artist Statement:
[This piece} Explores what it feels like to lose your language and the feelings of anger, shame, and guilt that come with it.
*白云苍狗: a Chinese idiom describing a white cloud changing to a grey dog; describes losing something important that has been lost without a trace.
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