telephone wires
after a photograph by Tina Modotti
to have called you
screeched a message tight
across the sky
the signals blown dry
untangled
so there’s no misunderstanding
but the wires are packed
too close
for inference between the lines
their tension buzzing live
messages in and of themselves
crossed
in such an orderly way
you’d think they had been thwarted
for a reason – as if
they could take you in the opposite direction
somewhere unexpected
where your ear would fill
heavy as a rain cloud
and my words would be
miraculously
released
Identity
these words, bricks of babel
stacked in the streets
of my tongue
the syntax wobbles
sounding nothing like the rhapsody
it was meant to be
an architecture of uncertainty
mispronounces the simpler words
sputtering the sibillants
stressing place between plosives
the broken machinery
grinds inside the cranium
murders meaning
my native tongue translates as
relating or belonging to a person or thing
a member of an indigenous people
glottic, lingual
a movable mass of muscular tissue
my native tongue flaps and
clanks, unoiled
abandons me to the gibberish of
a person or thing abstracted
an indigent us
forked and floudering under the weight
of silence
Copyright © Anamaria Crowe Serrano, 2008
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