Glossolalia
by Sonja Livingston
Speaking in tongues:
Speaking of tongues, two cups of vodka and a bit of lime loosened
mine, or else your piano playing, chord striking chord, with thick
elegant fingers—so much more to the flight than you allow,
still you’re backed by clouds while I go down, am saved, born
again, delivered whole into your arms, the baby you never wanted.
The ecstatic utterance
But I’m given blanket and bear, a better mother this time.
And all this sobbing is enough to drown the swarm of bees raging
on your sofa—a period piece, come over on the Mayflower. And
you, with sugar on the finger, a bit of sweet stuck to your thumb,
imagine perhaps the making of a queen, the way she’s fed by
her nurses, royal jelly slathered from the tops of their heads.
Of emotionally agitated religious persons,
And sometimes walls will leak honey, when nests are built in the
wrong places, and sometimes such sweetness is discouraged, and all
that building is for nothing. And the color of that pillow: pink
like flesh, yellow like mango, Turkish and plodding and not at all
right. And the color of that carpet: kaleidoscope split open, the
bellies of thirty-six Christmases emptied onto the floor. And the
spider from the schizophrenic’s head, the one we spoke of
earlier (in careful humanistic tones) that very same spider has
climbed in through my eye, that very same one, or one like those
under the docks at your French-Canadian lake.
A jumble of disjointed unintelligible sounds,
And though I’ve memorized sacraments, can mouth beatitudes
and novenas, know all about ashes and oil and last-minute mass cards,
with you I become Huguenot before the Holy Roman See—with
you, I become Protestant, honeycombed cells, spiders falling from
my tongue. And this, my last minute song. And this, trying to speak
everything into the space before the blade takes me down, God’s
breath moving like an insect in my ear.
Those who speak believe their voices moved by the spirit
I drink and weep, laugh and make fire, fall and talk crazy, like
St. Paul said to do. And that Paul knew a thing or two. And so do
you. But no amount of sugar or fine-fingered playing can make girl
into queen once she’s been born; it’s in the womb that
the structure is set. It’s before the breathing’s begun
that anyone has half a chance. After that, all thrones are spoken
for. After that, it’s all tears and trying.
In words unfettered by reason or rule.
Sonja Livingston’s work has won an Iowa Award, NYFA Fellowship, Pushcart Prize nomination, and grants from the Deming Fund and the Vermont Studio Center. Her writing appears in The Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fugue, Nimrod, Gulf Coast, Apalachee Review, and many others. Sonja holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and teaches in UCLA Extension’s Creative Writing Program. (9/2006)
