How to Find Your Tongue & The Guinea Hog
by Nancy White
How to Find Your Tongue
swallow smoke from a burning home
say the name they were going to give
you till you were born a girl
make an ovarian overture perch
on a swing before the resulting
crowd and sing if they throw
roses cucumbers don’t flinch
go to the butcher and buy a long cow’s tongue
examine it closely there on the counter
until you feel you’ll never be hungry again
remember the smoke tasting bitter
and how it loosened the hinge?
study the raised receptors like
mushrooms like eyestalks the pink
and gray the tendons and flanges
ask your friends to join you
ask them to kiss you better
ask the best to demonstrate
say it’s okay to show you on a lemon
when they’ve all gone home
quietly eat the lemon don’t
be surprised to come up gasping feel
the hole now in the middle of your head
and just past that the tongue
The Guinea Hog
Companionable. Curious.
They come home in the fall
for their own butchering.
Smaller than your other hogs
but crosses are never
such good company.
I’ve bred them with big hogs.
The meat’s good but can’t get
that nice personality.
Feels bad when they’re so
pleased to see me in September,
trotting out of the woods.
I’m glad to see them too, long as
I don’t think about it. Not
the best money but the best hog.
Nancy White is the author of three poetry collections: Sun, Moon, Salt (winner of the Washington Prize), Detour, and Ask Again Later. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, and many others. She serves as editor-in-chief at The Word Works in Washington, D.C. and teaches at SUNY Adirondack in upstate NY.
About “How to Find Your Tongue” she writes, “We are born with a natural drive to communicate and to express ourselves, but trauma can steep that need with fear, leading to silence. I often write about the struggle back to speech, and nothing embodies all the pleasure and strangeness of communication like the tongue itself. It makes a great metaphor because it does so much for us—eating, talking, kissing, and more—and is a funny-looking and even ugly part of the body to behold. In this poem, we’re thinking about the role of the tongue in speaking but also thinking of it as something that does get eaten. The hidden violence in our meat-eating, the physical ugliness of the tongue, and the other imagery all evoke (I hope) the more brutal side of our struggle to find a way to win our voice back after violence or other trauma. I hope this poem also captures the triumph we experience when we do win back our voice.
About “Guinea Hog” she writes, “Killing enters this poem too, and again I’m contrasting it with innocence or a natural state of sociability, in this case, that of the hogs. The raising and butchering of livestock that homesteaders and small-scale farmers practice is both more humane and more challenging. How can we kill animals we know? Are we more or less complicit in cruelty and violence if it happens in an impersonal way, off-stage, and we just buy the burgers and fry them up without thinking much about it? In this poem I tried to capture the farmer’s fondness and also his matter-of-fact approach to killing these hogs. I hope the poem comes across as appreciative, sad, with a tinge of uneasiness. Part of what’s sad is the hogs’ trust and friendliness, but also, for me, their inability to communicate or to understand what is happening. They become a metaphor for all the trusting people who suffer at the hands of others, those who turn to their fellow human expecting acceptance and receiving quite another thing altogether.