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Bite Your Tongue
- Southern Illinois University Press
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29 Bite Your Tongue Bullets are for movie stars and going cold turkey. Nails are for something close to fear. Though I’ve felt teeth kick up like gravel on the tongue’s underbelly. Tongue-tied I kept the mordant pleasure to myself. Speak in tongues, but bite your tongue when you have spoken too much. As in Double Indemnity. My favorite line is shut up, baby: bold, recalcitrant boredom in black and white. Or the clink of ice in a highball gin, what another drink always means: something close to fear. There must have been that mean gray time between the silents and the talkies when the face meant less, the tongue more. One night, the world went to bed with no voice. It must have seemed a miracle, and so real, that reel of tape unraveling on its spool like the tongue of a woman hot from liquor and her bald, snoozing husband. Or in my favorite cartoon, the dead man speaks in pure idiom. Naturally, each cat owns another’s tongue, lays it paw-wide, flat and vascular even in those days of heavy color saturation. Tongueless was the trait, shut up baby the safest insult to yourself. But say we all 30 kept on in silence as pictures spoke through the lips of every Jack and Jill who could afford the matinee. News hummed into allied bombings, films went noir. Even as we could, we talked less. And when the tongue shrinks inside the skull, looks less a wick than a bad worm, and candles blow out for a new century, we’ll peer from the balcony at mimes performing wars that never started and say, what strange sounds their stomachs make, their feet, the purrs from their tired, flapping arms. ...