But Moses said to the Lord, “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.”
Exodus 4:10
Maybe the child learned to speak
the river first: sudden rush
of fricatives, of water splitting
reed, the thresh the hitch
the lapping into bankside
strainer trees, syntax sedging
ripplewise—its rise, its
sudden fall. Maybe he learned
the spaces there, how fish
make sounds their bodies
shape: their silver commas
gulping air, then disappearing
down. It’s these spaces
he starts to mouth,
gumming their shape, their weight,
their breadth, the way they pressurize
the throat then finally gust
across—they cascade
out of him, then build,
pause and hold his throat
again. He learns the pace.
He eddies, swells. He teethes
the current’s crack. Voices
approach: the child cries.
He hears the river babble back.
after Jjjjjerome Ellis, Jordan Scott
Talia Isaacson practices poetry as defined by Alice Oswald: that is, poetry as “not about language, but about what happens when language gets impossible.” Informed by experience with a glottal block stutter, Talia’s work dwells in the agricultural and ecological, working to understand patterns of fluency and the wisdom in derailing them. She is from San Diego, California, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia.
