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You are here: Home / 21.2 / Third Language

Third Language

21.2, Poetry by Ioanna-Veronika Warwick

Poetry is not English.
—Ian Krieger

In high school I kept
a diary in English,
so if the teacher
caught me, and she did,
she wouldn’t understand.
I had a small vocabulary
and even less to say:
“The weather’s getting warm,”
I confessed in a foreign language.

My first class in Los Angeles,
on June evenings,
in the palm-plumed dusk,
was a typing course.
For rhythm, the instructor played
“The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
On an ancient manual, in cross-fire
of night students pounding
on the jamming keys,
I machined a sinister language:
Dear Sir: Due to circumstances
beyond our control….

College was a subordinate clause.
I bartered my youth
for footnotes to Plato.
I was a mouse in the auditorium,
scribbling neat, useless notes,
eating out my heart in the heart
of the Research Library.
One week I graded three hundred
freshman papers on the death penalty.
I didn’t want to graduate.
Life was penalty enough.

I had to learn a third language,
an on-off code in the brain
it takes nightmares to crack—
words husked from the grain of things,
Adamic names that fit
animals like their own pelts;
fluent as flowers, rare as rubies,
occult atoms in the lattices of sleep.

To be silent and let it speak.

 

Ioanna-Veronika Warwick, a widely published poet and translator, was born in Poland and now lives in California.

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Call for Submissions

Call for submissions for issue #51, as well as our poetry and micro essay contests. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

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