Janiru Liyanage

after Aria Aber
I broke into english how a man once broke into my mother.
At the halflight of his bite, pink flesh and all teeth. How my
mother once broke into the neighbor's dog with her mouth; stole

and ate it raw because she was hungry and needed to survive. None
of it was graceful, and all wild brute. I ruined the wind

shined slick in my windpipe for years before I could use "I" in a poem. Now,
how to stop baying? The strange spill, animal-husk, wound and hook rusting into
my nape. My mother spits blood in her dreams; cannot sleep so she comes to

our rooms instead. Names us, and we remain nameless only in the language
of ash and shadow and amen. In the ESL class, the teacher tells me to run my

tongue across my teeth when saying throat. Push it hard, she says.
So, I scrape it tenderly from my mouth - fold it into
a knife and hold it to my neck. Somedays, I am so ripe with

complete syntax, like smoke arrowed cleanly from a rifle. Others, I find
myself gasping - in the same way when I was five, the day I got a

milk dud lodged in my throat, and because I only knew the Sinhala
word for swallow, I shouted Help, I've gilased it. I've gilased it.
Of course, no one came. They watched the stupid boy, past-tense

a past in the wrong present. My mother calls to tell me how she's
going with her english. Tries to impress me and says, the root of song

is son meaning you are at the root of all my songs, meaning you are my
only song. I tell her she is wrong. I teach her etymology with all the languages
that have no history she can kin. I hang up and do not ask if she needs help with

anything. I am miles away, on a plane and she message me to check her
spelling in a text. Look at this and tell me if it's right: A boy was killed today

by police. They opened him and he was read. He was read all over
the asphalt. Read all over the cold metal. Read all over his mouth,
and read in his broken throat.

I do not reply. When I land, the border patrol agent says
Your english is very good. It's almost like you were born here.

And my body opens; pink glass, cut tongue.
I took the english in, gilased it gilased it,
until it glistened in me, sharp and angular and torn red,

my good brutish blood.
Red in my softest throat.
from the journal MUZZLE MAGAZINE
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For a long time, my mum would send me these texts asking to check her spelling, grammar, etc. This is a classic brown parent thing, but once, she sent “read”, when she meant “red”— this triggered the conception of this poem; for cruelty to be distilled into three letters. Here, I think of english (and my relationship with it) in ways that are more taboo to the Western world: english as erasure, english as a border, english as a brutality. 
Composite image of poets and the front cover to the anthology of Amharic poetry, Songs We Learn from Trees
"Ethiopia’s Thriving Amharic Poetry Scene"

"A poem is not just the meaning. Some poems shout or cry, and it’s very difficult to convey the poet’s voice. I would have liked to have the Amharic original included in the anthology, or an accompanying CD....Amharic also has the flexibility that inflected language gives you in rhyming and structuring the poem."

via WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS
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Cover of Sylvia Plath's book, The Collected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Corinna Vallianatos on Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying"

"Nothing is ever nothing—description gives nothing shape. The seeing gains power, even as the one doing the seeing recedes. The bounty of what’s come before, the berries and their juices and the milkbottle the speaker uses to collect them, which brings to mind the body and domesticity, lifts at the end into the elemental, something seemingly less comforting but, to me, more so."
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