manual for the tongue whose first language is a churile of my second
By Nadia Misir
a churile swims the length of
the demerara river in my dreams.
she tows her dead
child behind her, catches me
in a net of black hair.
do you want to know how to
buss a gyaff, she asks.
ditch the ipa chart. mimic
your grandmother’s
canal no. 1 lips. howl
the choo-ryle’s grief into a
cornelia ida cane field sitting
at the bottom
of your uncle’s coors light can.
the churile’s grief is the undertow of
every overseas gyaff. in her hands
the saltwater-pickled tongue of my
great-great-great grandmother sings.
a tongue without a mouth
sings the loudest, she says.
do you want to know how to
buss a gyaff?
listen for the
wagwans the sita-rams
the how yuh dos
the langtime me nah see yous
listen for
what the story says and
wield your grandfather’s cutlass.
reply with
di’ ’tory ’tweet.
(even if it’s not.) chop up
the queen’s english, prune
the consonants, make room
for the vowels to stretch their backs.
somewhere at the bottom of the demerara river
a colonial officer is hoarding the
Ss that somersault off my tongue,
smooth like the tamarind seeds my mother
swallows when she is five. somewhere
at the bottom of the demerara river
is the tamarind tree i wish
climbed up my esophagus
and out of my yankee mouth
that time i swallowed
a handful of tamarind seeds. i was desperate
to cough up
a shipwreck a ship manifest
a house on stilts
a bottomless bottomhouse
a saltwater-pickled tongue—
anything to soak up the currents of
a seasickness over a hundred years young
that drenches
my feet
Source: Poetry (July/August 2019)