blert

Fable is excerpted from my poetry collection blert, which undertakes a “poetics of stutter.” At its base level, blert is a text written to be as difficult as possible for me to read. Poetically, the tempo of blert (like the pace of my mouth) is of suspension and falter, clinical and personal. Written as a spelunk into the mouth of a stutterer, blert is a trek across labial regions, a navigation of tracheal rills, and a full bore squirm inside the mouth’s wear and tear.

The stutter here appears on its own terms, rejecting the metaphoric, thematic, graphic (a-a-a-a), or representational aspects of this language disturbance. The text is written as if my own gibbering mouth chomped upon the language system, then regurgitated the cud of difference. My symptoms are the agents of composition. Each furious millisecond of personal struggle colliding with language as a rolling gait of words hidden within words, of syllables in cleavage and breach, all erupting as palpable lava on the palate. The burn and crush in your own mouth are dysfluency—animating the bobble of your tongue’s slight erosions, of glossary grapple and your now-constant ache for smooth. blert is written as a threat to coherence, as a child’s thick desire to revamp the alphabet, as an inchoate moan edging toward song. 

You monsoon across the alphabet, croon turbulence and whisper: A is for alligator, against the Mississippi marooned on my gums. Gumbo thrums from lips and you drizzle glossary, soak into S like your throat gurgles the wrung-out cotton from a humid Zandunga: Say S, say sathasha sashatha, say spoon. I hiss and that is all. Say S, shass shassha, say ... gymnasts squat bulk quads atop your tongue, S somersaults warm into P and I geyser, hoot, O-O at this alphabetic kinetic. Say S, say shrathra shrathrashra, say spoon. Your pucker hunkers in singsong:

When zigzags of zebra finches regurgitate the sky a dumb purple, you must put a spoon in your mouth and clap clams for wet tinkerbells. You will lunge your thorax into spring. Open wide—and pollen, like cotton balls, will faint from your lips onto the pawpaw papaya of next syllable. You will learn the drawl of apricot, roll core in glottal, and drool quiet in the comma. You will sing like the birds.

In that field torn in two by train tracks, I lie down on my back. Pick nose, pick noises, pluck bugs, pump hula hoop, slingshot grasshoppers into throat’s long black sleeves. Bloated in wait, my mantra chunk: will not imagine myself as a giant mouth. Will not think that words are enormous. Will not chew gum, or put gobstoppers, lollipops or toffee in my mouth before the finches drown the sky with their hollow bones.

At dusk the sun ughed against horizon and the finches bruised the sky purple. I put the spoon in my mouth. Ziplocked lip to tin. I put the spoon in my mouth, incisor chunks bunt, bunt, bunt to Pango Pango sky. Wingpit spoons the hyoid frantic. Ebb ebb clanks palate in hallux drag. The birds were in my mouth. Feathered clumps sop up mucus, peck plaque for pomegranate, doo-wop glottal stop, talon and lore toward lung’s perch.

I take the spoon out of my mouth. Open wide. Wait for trill. Open wide. Will not mumble, will not slur, will not dread the word, will not chew gum, or put gobstoppers, lollipops or toffee in my mouth before each vocal tilt flirts cuckoo. If you brace a megaphone to my throat, you will hear a tiddlywink bleat, a lark rustle in the ripe corn, and my esophagus blunderbuss—exhaust in your glossary.