Alexander Bilzerian: Tongue
The throat is a country and the tongue its only
passport. For twenty years he carried the question
across the soft border of his palate and brought back
the answer, sticky on his teeth. Interrogator
and detainee met inside him the way two rivers meet
inside a third that is neither. The word for water
in one mouth became the word for water in the other
only by passing through the wet dark of his.
He learned to hold a sentence the way his grandmother
carried coals on a shovel from house to house
in winter, cupping the live heat from her own breath
so her breath would not kill it, and he did this
in rooms whose windows had been painted over, and he did this
in the back of trucks, and he did this at checkpoints
where the dust laid a second language on everyone’s lips,
and afterwards, having set the day’s freight down,
he went home and sang to his daughter in the older tongue,
the one that did not have to pass inspection, the one
whose vowels were the shape of her mother’s name,
and he believed—this is the part he cannot now unbelieve—
that two mouths could share one sentence
and the sentence be a kind of mercy, that a bridge
was a bridge and not a throat a man could be fed into,
and some of them learned his name, and some of them
meant what they said, and the paperwork was real, and the list
was real, and the helicopters were real, and the not-
being-on-them was also real, the not-being-on-them
was the realest thing,
and now in the house in the lane
behind the market where the neighbors have begun
to look at him the way you look at a door, deciding
whether to knock or break it down, his mouth is closed,
the mouth through which for twenty years
one country spoke itself into another,
and in the next room his daughter is practicing.
She is saying butterfly, she is saying Wednesday,
she is saying I am from, and he can hear her shaping the shapes
he taught her, tongue to the ridge behind the teeth,
lips just parted, the small held breath before the voiced
consonant, and he stands in the doorway where she
cannot see him, and he does not tell her to stop,
and he does not tell her to continue, because the mouth
that carried the word for twenty years has no word
for what he would say to her, which predates the mouth,
and she is saying father, and her mouth is open,
and his mouth is open, and no sound comes,
and she laughs at her own mouth, because the word
came out crooked, and tries again,
and the house holds them both inside its listening
the way a throat holds
what it cannot yet swallow or say.
—from Poets Respond
Appeared in RATTLE
Alexander Bilzerian: “I began ‘Tongue’ by asking what a mouth becomes after twenty years of serving as a border. Stefanie Glinski’s Guardian report, ‘They were hunted by the Taliban for helping the US. Now, Trump wants to send these families to the DRC,’ gave the question its ground: 1,100 Afghans evacuated by the United States, at least 700 of them women and children, held since 2024 in a hangar at Qatar’s As-Sayliyah camp. The camp was a transit point. It is now a holding pen ahead of forced relocation to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country in active conflict whose language they do not speak. Zahra Muhib, fifteen, has been diagnosed with depression and anxiety in the camp. When she was taken to the hospital, she and her father were fitted with GPS trackers so they could not escape. The speaker is one of those men, rendered from the inside. The poem ends on a mouth gone silent. The reporting makes that silence the exact shape of the promise.”
