I was thinking, how, despite years of dogged
practice, English is still the slick
winged serpent the dull flute of my tongue
has failed to charm: cracked syllables slithering
past a rein of pink muscle
into audible exoticness that marks me as alien
on this side of the planet. How I envy you native
speakers—your minds falling
into the language like agile skinny-dippers diving
straight through water, your mind-bodies unimpeded
by the gravity of syntax.
When you mean to say you’re in or out of love
the verb is almost always fall, not plunge or parachute,
never bellyflop. How I wanted
to invent my own physics of English! Still, at school,
I fell prey to shame like a day-old lamb caught
in a lion’s mouth. Wishing
all my vowels would be rinsed clean of their knotted
foreignness, I whip-trained my wild tongue until it fell
in line with every phonetic rule.
When the boy I’d loved in bashful secrecy finally touched
me & touched me & touched me until my body
was a high bright whistle, I thought
This must be what it means, in English, to fall—eyes closed,
trusting the air to hold you as if it were your own
flesh. Not the way Icarus fell—mid
-flight, mouth agape, betrayed by sun’s searing heat
as wax-tipped feathers streamed from his back
like jet plane contrails. But the way
dusk once fell across pebbled path, shaded by curlicues
of azalea blooms, as I walked home each afternoon years
ago, repeating out loud the day’s lesson:
The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain, so I could dream
at night of freefalling off my tongue’s steep cliffthrough
perfect English & still, each morning,
I’d rise faithfully from death.

Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer immigrant poet. Their work has appeared in New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Waxwing, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Their debut poetry collection, At the Altar of Touch, is forthcoming from the University of Queensland Press in 2022. English is their second language.