mouth sounds

one afternoon, I fell into a champagne glass
drum beat bubbles popped as I sank and as I drank
I dreamt I dropped face first into the grass

I spoke a sentence that
spattered and slobbered as it
flipped from my mouth
outstretched and upside down
pulled taut and coiled around clarity
percolating in sticky brown sugar
bubbling up from my gums and
shaking out my rotten, foggy, softened teeth

so now, I swallow incendiary coffee grounds
soothe my throat with the low-hanging clouds
sipping acid and absent-minded embers
remember to remember the generator hum

memorizing a montage made from
from scrap metal and dull mouth sounds

what did the distant cars speak like?
what was the pattern of tongue taps?
where is the nausea in monotony?
the gear-turning, stomach churning fear of machinery?
the mechanics are stumped that I can’t speak

secrets get lodged in my chest
dust coats my fingertips
getting tripped up by smoke
and choked up by birdsong

so I rinse my mouth out with sours
trace the shapes in the woodgrain
count the coffee stain spots in my eyes
tug at my shirt sleeve and try
to speak again

On November 28, 2018, I went to a faculty recital called “Gertrude Stein and Liberty: An Evening of Improvised Music and Poetry”. This consisted of an English professor and a Spanish professor reading Gertrude Stein’s poetry while the percussion professor improvised music. Stein’s poems (for example, “If I told him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, “Pigeons on the Grass Alas”, and “Susie Asado”) are very rhythmic, repetitive, and intentionally nonsensical, which was wonderful to listen to combined with xylophones and drums. I wrote some lines at this concert which became the beginning of this poem.

Another thing that influenced this poem was the feeling of hearing yourself in a recording and feeling self-conscious about how you sound. One time I just heard myself speak and immediately after, I was surprised by how I sounded. One of the lines I ended up cutting for this version was “words follow with creaky footsteps”.

I wrote a lot of this during January-February 2019, and it was cold, rainy, and dreary in Boone, and next to my dorm began some major construction. Where previously was a small field for, an open green space, was fenced off and leveled to in order to build a new dorm. As of February 2020, the construction is still going.