Like Glossolalia

Like a van garde avant. Like drinking tea filtered through a Russian soldier’s underwear. Like speaking through saxophone skronk. Like drying your back with nettles and swallowing a chaw of thistles. Like bored sawing through panel board. Like watching Window Water Baby Moving backwards. Like finding a nubbin of your desiccated umbilical cord pressed between two cotton balls thirty years later. Like finding a random head in your Tupperware Cake Taker. Like coming of age at 37. Like throat singing in Spanglish. Like pressing your ear close to an ambulance siren. Like walking off a pier because you hear the mermaids singing. Like, why would they be singing to you? Like, huh?

What I’m Reading:

“I write in the knowledge that there is nothing to lose by saying the difficult thing in common/uncommon ways, knowing that the beauty of a line lies in the alchemy of doubt, adrenalin and risk. Mainstream judgement of what is ‘good’ is based on elite opinion, curated over years. It is necessarily corrupt. I’d rather write an ‘ugly’ line, to such eyes.”

— Preti Taneja / “Notes on Craft”