There is a language of two arms dancing in tandem. There is a language of our mouths parting in frostbitten rings, concentric circles rippling peace. There is a language of peace and a language of romance. You can speak neither or both and a language is only understandable to some, else the world might hear. There is a language of the sweat off our backs dripping in trails, entrails of insides strewn across floors, because we speak in the pain. There is a language for me, not really for you, a language I listen to when it speaks back to me. For you’ve never straddled the cosmic belt between a language to speak and one to hear, a language through which I’ve lost centuries. My mother says she pities me in the motherland because they wouldn’t take me as their own: I belong not to the mother tongue but to the spangled banners. There is a language noisy sounding, brawling, reminiscent of German that is the language I have learned like a roughened lover. I’ve brushed with my thumbs where his hips slope to thigh, and the nook between jaw and collar. He slammed my head against the wall and embraced me in a lock and key I knew I might never fit again (The Germans have a word dasein for the paradox of being like my mere state a pull between two hands that stretch). She says they wouldn’t take me as their own and neither would the Americans. The children of immigrants rise a new tsunami and these children know the feeling of swallowing a tide of shame at their mothers’ broken English. These children know to act the reluctant mediator, because when a mother speaks broken English and the child knows it like a lover the mother becomes fragments and child becomes same, like switching bodies except both are devoid of crucial parts like vessels without blood and brain. These children want to hear the pin-drop in a cave that roars stillness to hear the echo of an echo. To look around, unmoving, in a city swarm, to seize a semblance of knowing, to say I belong here, with you, with you all, not anywhere else, here, where any link that snaps homogeneity is an outsider, and I am not. To say, I belong here, is a travesty. To the shade of your skin or the slant of my eyes. I wonder what it would be like to write a poem such as this, a long and lengthy poem, of curious words and stacked phrases, a poem of worlds and small rivers, to show it to my mother to know she can understand every word and nothing less. I wouldn’t know. Not in this lifetime. Maybe in another, we’ll dismantle the walls that encircle us. There is a language of demolition, too.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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