“Touch Sets the Mouth in Motion” by Chelsea Duarte

Author Questions:

• Sometimes poetry is what you choose to leave out; how do you support the intended voids in your writing? This is a paradox—when does silence NOT speak loud enough?
• Can you define a point when the language of a work caters too much to the writer’s interiority, and is too personal or too unexplored to receive interest or understanding from the audience?

tracing
the corners: the convex
shape of the lip

the mouth
has an entirely different
language, its vernacular within
a fistful of palpable
buds, polyps bursting with wild boars and geese

a night
i was there, pulling
salmon streams, entire mountain sides,
marshlands through the tiny aperture

there’s
something to grasp: it’s not
a fruit in the hand, even glands pocket
salt after times nightless, waterless
and chewing

taking flight:
a bird departs the feathery
grass

at
the height
of all its stirring,
the tongue evaporates,

swallowing space after all the words
have left it, asking, “were you aware then
of its singing, aware
of all its needing?”

© 2011 by Chelsea Duarte