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  • The Salt Craving, and: If Smoke Could Sing
  • Wesley Rothman (bio)

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

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.

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