- The Salt Craving, and: If Smoke Could Sing
after Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker
How you speak the words changes them. Salt peanuts in a whispered hum signalselegy, a mourning. A raspy squeal makes them a punch-
line: arbitrary nuts salted,strolling. I hear the earth in them roasting, hear them spread across my tongue, nakedand gnashed to pieces. And the sting—
salt dissolves the slick sidewalks, seasons just about everything, bitesand bites back after every bite, torturing the tongue. I scoop another handful because I need the lash of language.
So I lash my mind with the ingenuity we have for salt. Preserve flesh. Sterilize soil. Makethe wound. Pack the wound. Torture is a salted imagination. Didn’t I [End Page 144]
horn you about punch lines? Didn’tI line you up, punch you with my horn? salt Peanuts! salt Peanuts! Don’t you understandevery note is a grain of blue
salt I’m dropping on the tongue, because you want it that badly, over and again?
If Smoke Could Sing
history would be more reliable
every bite of meat would tell you a story
maybe we’d be better listeners
we would call them song-bombs
or song-grenades hurled into a crowd
how loud would the sound rise
we would smell music
all the burning buildings and crematoriums
what more might become ash
perhaps leaving the beloved would be less of a shock
snuff me now. [End Page 145]
Wesley Rothman’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Review, Mississippi Review, Narrative, and New England Review, among other venues. Recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, he works with Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, and American Microreviews and Interviews. Roth-man teaches throughout Boston.