By Laura Ferries
I piece together these jigsaw words
thread them together in broken verse
spaghetti sentences
spun around my tongue
tangled elegantly
tagliatelle
a language not so much spoken but sung
staccato
I season my accent,
pepper my punctuation;
marinate slowly the sentence formation.
Meanwhile, his English is crystal clear,
distilled
but still
A cappella
I learn the lyrics
I wing the words
still songless birds
raw in the word
down to the bone
unusual dictionary
devouring the words, I nurture them known.
About Laura Ferries:
Ferries is a high school English teacher and writer who explores life, love, place, and space in her poetry. She runs a travel blog at www.lauraferries.com and has self-published two collections of her poems. Ferries has a love of languages, and speaks Spanish and Italian. She performs regularly at spoken word events in Liverpool and hosted her own bilingual English-Spanish poetry night in October 2021.