Carlos Andrés Gómez

Where Language Ends

After Keith Leonard

How can a single

language carry a pitch-

perfect word? A color

parade dozens

of nuanced inflections

in one tongue but only sing

a solitary hue elsewhere?

The slang-term overused

in Playa del Carmen

mean the exact opposite

in the high-altitude pulse

of Bogotá?

In Japanese, there is a single

word that means finding beauty

in imperfections.

Linguists think the word bully

evolved from the Dutch word boel,

meaning lover. The word

awful meant full of awe. I listen

to old recordings of myself

at three telling my sister

secrets in a language I no

longer speak.

In Farci, there is no direct

equivalent to I love you.

Instead, the commonly used

phrase literally translates to:

I know you as my friend.

My friends, I do not know

the precise day my first language

fully left me, but I recall

relishing its familiar

music like a muffled

eavesdrop against a door.

I listened to my parents argue

as a small child in a language

I thought I knew. I would hear

each word clearly but could not

make out a single word’s meaning.

I wonder if the poems matter

at all.

In German, there’s a single word

to describe a face badly in need

of a fist.

In Norwegian: the euphoria

you feel as you begin to fall

in love.

When I comfort my love

the first time she encounters

death unexpected, it is the sturdy

haven of my arms & chest.

Only the vernacular of touch

keeps her from the floor.

In Brazilian Portuguese

there is a single word for tenderly

running your fingers through your

lover’s hair.

I’m not writing a poem, I’m running

my hands through her hair, on days

like today, when the stanza feels

like the most suffocating

room. I part

& braid the hair

of my beloved, fingers

detangle strands

into smooth lines

like the arteries

of a map. I inhale

the scent of essential oils

& shea butter. And there,

peering around the corner:

a dialect of six-year-old irises

carried through generations,

across oceans, the marvel & loss

& rebirth of language, where

absence became the brutal

miracle from which lineage

was drawn.

Our daughter is up

past her bedtime, tracing

her mother’s crown

carefully for the first time

with her eyes as though

it were a smuggled book

teaching her to speak.

---

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet and the author of "Fractures" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Winner of the International Book Award, Gómez has been published in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives with his family in Atlanta.

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Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

Aubade in 21st Century America

Last night, walking for chocolate-studded

ice cream, we talked about gratitude—

slippery son-of-a-gun—and the mansion—

unwalled—you and I hold in common.

I woke to a text checking if

the four of us are far enough

from a man who shot three machine guns

at many people in multiple towns.

I wrote funs at first—imagine that:

all these white men, desperate, desperate

for eyes ears hands, breathing inside

a role as prophet, avenger, god

instead reload and fire fun over

corner stores and crowds of strangers.

We are far and grateful; we listen into

the grates in us that wind moves through.

---

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize, and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry in 2021. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, and Orion, and he currently serves as Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

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Allison deFreese

Signs

To Sarika after Bashō

You ignite air

when signing,

when palmar bumps palm,

when the thumb

skips pebbles over the index

in the dry silence

where words round

or fold then splay.

Your hands are origami.

Paper boats and cranes float

off the fingers,

take flight over water.

The temple bells have stopped

ringing

but the sound keeps coming

out of the flowers.

---

Allison A. deFreese grew up on a pig farm. She raised ducks and chickens and had over thirty cats. She learned to impersonate birds and kittens, which brought mother cats running from their secret summer nests so she could find their kitties. She placed in a state writing contest before dropping out of the sixth grade. She has no high school credits to her name but has taught in high schools—where students in such places are still planning their escape.

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