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Writer's pictureStephanie Hu

白云苍狗

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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