by S.G. Garbin

His tongue stumbles over rough geography,
twisting and rupturing sounds, peanut-shell cracks
In words unrecognizable; English turned inside out.
His injured words lean on the crutch of his smile.

Ardent eyes connect themselves to my mouth,
psychic meters of light and shadow,
echoing movements from my lips not yet dry
before they are imprinted on his own.

He is mining for nuggets, scraping the surface raw,
erecting sentences word by word,
crawling over narrow, tongue-grooved trails.
Together, we cling to theories like lingual gods in a soundless storm.

Sweating, he sinks into his foxhole of silence,
painting his frustration in the air, deft fingers that say "This is so hard."
Then, head in hands, the instruments of his voice
roughly push back too-long hair from his eyes.

I resurrect his ambition, deny his collapse.
Use your words, I say, reconnecting his eyes to my mouth-map.
Dutifully, he lays his hands upon the table,
and with them, the grace and fluency of his native language.