The Tongue that Tastes Too Much
by Mara Grayson
I.
After three months on a feeding tube,
my boyfriend’s hunger swallows everything
unnuanced, missing how the salt of soy sauce paves
the way for the depth of its umami. I learn quickly
that silence is the righteous way to speak
of things too neuron-small for tongues to taste.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just don’t remember
what the doctors said about his tongue-to-brain
connection. It’s hard, you know, to memorialize
what someone else has since erased.
It’s safer to make sense of things
with gesso, to refrain from seeking wonder-things
outside the popular imaginary. Oh, so this
is where my tongue puts on its graduation gown:
A body can become a thing
if its neighbor isn’t careful.
II.
My friend Paulina is a supertaster. When she tries
to describe the mouth-burn of a food-thing,
swelling unapparent to the naked eye,
a crescendo through the two eustachian tubes
from spices no more coarse than grains of salt,
I think about delegitimized grief.
That’s what I’m told creates this feeling-thing
inside the well that was my stomach once, the soil
stuck between my ears. The truth
is I’ve been starving, too, with no support
group set of steps to mourn
the grief that has no name. I tell Paulina that
I know: The tongue can be a wicked thing,
a knowing-thing, a stumbling thing.
My tongue has been a sawhorse set up
like a roadblock; my tongue
has been the freedom-thing
that breaks to bring the passers by.
Listen to the poem here.
After three months on a feeding tube,
my boyfriend’s hunger swallows everything
unnuanced, missing how the salt of soy sauce paves
the way for the depth of its umami. I learn quickly
that silence is the righteous way to speak
of things too neuron-small for tongues to taste.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just don’t remember
what the doctors said about his tongue-to-brain
connection. It’s hard, you know, to memorialize
what someone else has since erased.
It’s safer to make sense of things
with gesso, to refrain from seeking wonder-things
outside the popular imaginary. Oh, so this
is where my tongue puts on its graduation gown:
A body can become a thing
if its neighbor isn’t careful.
II.
My friend Paulina is a supertaster. When she tries
to describe the mouth-burn of a food-thing,
swelling unapparent to the naked eye,
a crescendo through the two eustachian tubes
from spices no more coarse than grains of salt,
I think about delegitimized grief.
That’s what I’m told creates this feeling-thing
inside the well that was my stomach once, the soil
stuck between my ears. The truth
is I’ve been starving, too, with no support
group set of steps to mourn
the grief that has no name. I tell Paulina that
I know: The tongue can be a wicked thing,
a knowing-thing, a stumbling thing.
My tongue has been a sawhorse set up
like a roadblock; my tongue
has been the freedom-thing
that breaks to bring the passers by.
Listen to the poem here.
 | Mara Lee Grayson’s work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Fiction, Nimrod, Pedestal, Poetry Northwest, Tampa Review, and other publications. Her poetry has been nominated for the Best of the Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. An award-winning scholar of rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Grayson is the author of three books of nonfiction. She holds an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Grayson resides in Southern California and works as an associate professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Find her on Twitter: @maraleegrayson. Find Mara’s latest book "Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric” through Peter Lang Publishing today. |