consider articulation, both speech
and the assembly of a joint,
the cooperation of bones and
marijuana; English: Mary Jane:
shoe, or the talentless friend you
secretly love who is also the pretty,
skirted woman in Spiderman who
keeps getting suspended, screaming,
from skyscrapers, and there, dangling, you
will begin to apprehend English,
which is both to fear and to understand
the difficult smallness of the words
getting errands done beneath you,
oblivious to the 42 definitions
of the word get, including
to leave immediately and to understand
the politician in a long red tie
giving an address beside the collapsed
building: building as noun,
not verb: address,
both the speech and the place
you live, unless you live nowhere—
then, you can live inside the speech.
Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. Her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Poet Laureate of Jamaica and Helen Zell Young Writer’s Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She currently lives in Connecticut near a small river and some train tracks.
