Álvaro jokes about committing identity theft for my citizenship–we have the same
birthday. Our laughter ripples through the room like a flock of skittish pigeons. We
conjugate silence into the simple present. My co-teacher corrects you: your mother tongue is a
dialect, throws a dangerous stain on the daylight, which I dab at. He spreads our disease in
English, emboldened. Don’t
forget the formula for a question. His intent is not malign, but its
g is silent, like me. I hate to wield authority, yet I show you how I
hold my tongue between my teeth, like this. I don’t use
imperatives. I’m sorry, we don’t have a single-word phrase for
jornalero. The term for arepa is arepa, but mangled. I don’t
know enough to teach a
language you shouldn’t need to know. You try:
mice to meet you. I flag the malapropism, make sure you place adjectives before
nouns, make geographies of language legible. The nativist narrative of this grammar
obfuscates even the objective. Any attempt to decode futile, a
phonetic three card monte that tangles any semblance of meaning into
quagmire. We study the shapes a sound makes in our mouths:
road just a slight turn of the tongue from rote. You practice, Can you
spill your name? As if across a
table. I let the letters soak the tablecloth, sweep them
under the carpet, where they saturate the cracks in the floorboards. In
Venezuela, the street where you grew up is hemorrhaging. You ask,
what is the name of this knife? Here it hangs midair. You describe
xenophobia. I have no words, but you offer me a cookie from the box you bought at the deli.
Your choral repetitions echo in my head at night, beside our shared
zodiac sign, twins lighting up the night sky.
Issue
22