| Poetry |
Losing Language Clara Changxin Fang
First it was writing. A blot in the brain that would not cohere on the page. Was this one preceded by a bird or a tiger? How many crosses and hatches are inside this house? The letters home become riddled with roman text, vowels garnished with a dash to indicate the tone. The diary entries peppered with foreign names. Next came reading, sentences with the breath let out of them, melodies with the notes dropped at crucial intervals, entire stories ruined by holes in the fabric. One by one, the concepts fell out of my head like rice leaking out of a torn pocket. Dreams now come to me in English. I write poems in English. I make love to you in English. My love, you have made me lose even what I took such pains to learn. What I want to tell you is beyond words, beyond even the intimacy of mother tongue, my tongue pressed to the softest part of your skull where the vowels reside.
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