Claire Wahmanholm
The New Language
After the fires, the plague, the long summers
of green rain, we wanted so badly to touch each other.
Our hunger had risen in us like yeast.
Our language now was heavier, was more
like earthworks—could, in some cases, be seen
from space.
Each word was a different arrangement
of bodies: a human body together with an animal body,
or a human body together with a body of water,
or a heavenly body together with a body cavity,
or the body of Christ together with a body bag.
It felt best to talk about the weather: our skin
had been waxed by plastic rain, and now
we permanently ached for the sky. For tornado,
one body blew on another’s pinwheeling hand.
Drought required one human body to backstroke across
another, which pretended to be a desert body’s
generous sand.
The cost of words was volatile.
Though they were always happening, we rarely spoke
of earthquakes (a stack of ten bodies lying on
a writhing eleventh). Hypercane took every body
we could find. Gore only required pieces.
We needed the sun to shine for exposure, needed
the alignment of at least three stars for fortune.
For debris, three people had to be the glitter,
the toothbrush, and the outlet cover, and one
had to be the baby albatross stomach. We fought
dumbly, grabbing at each other’s mouths,
grunting eat eat eat.
Agreement was difficult, then
impossible. Down the street, we found four human bodies
kicking the body of a cat and finally understood this
to be a version of scapegoat. In the alley, we couldn’t read
the two bodies that stood forehead to forehead,
counting each other’s blinking.
Some words could only
be said once. Irreversible required each participating body
to turn itself inside out. For zero sum, everyone had to agree
to become light at the same time. We were hoping
to save that one for the end, though there wouldn’t be
a shape for that pain: the sound of the sun, the sight
of a thought split from its body, the rain like rain.