ANOTHER THEORY ON LANGUAGE

Recently I've been making up
words for things that language
hasn't caught up to yet. Like
Hungerentäuschung, which is
when you spend hours cooking
a thoroughly unsatisfying dinner
but force yourself to eat it anyway
even though hours later
you'll stand in front of the pantry
in your underwear, eating fistfuls
of croutons from the bag.
Or Empörugbotschaft, which is
exactly how you feel when someone
replies to your email and not only
have they not answered the question,
they ask you a question
that your message took great pain
to answer. Empörugbotschaft,
you think, which means, Per
my last email, fuck the fuck off.
You might feel uneasy about using,
of all the languages, German
for expressions of irritation
bordering on blind rage.
But nothing exists until 
we build its cage of syllables.
Gladstone was sailing around
The Odyssey when he finally
figured out the Greeks never
actually said blue, not once.
If blue is only 4500 years old,
of course we don't have one
for email rage, or hunger
that isn't really hunger. For you,
husband, I make up all the words.
I read Swedish, Indonesian, Icelandic.
I cover my body not in ink
but in pictographs. I steal, I borrow,
I colonize, I blue. Because language
is not enough, never has been.
Never will be. Homer called honey
green, the sea wine-dark.
Now we say blue. Once,
there were no words for you and I.
Now, we have so many
they spill from our lips.
We talk all night. We go days
without actually speaking.

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SURPRISE! FEAR!

On the phone, my friend who is a parent 
says, I think we don't talk about anxiety 
with kids because the idea of irrational fear 
would be terrifying. Like, hey, kiddo, fear 
isn't enough, you also gotta worry about *surprise* fear
which is a million-dollar idea I immediately steal. 
My fake marketing firm specializes in rebranding 
terrible things. Our logo is the Chilean sea bass, 
which of course is just the Patagonian toothfish 
all dressed up for American restaurants. 
Toothfish is honest, but Chilean sea bass pulls
$27 a plate. The firm specializes in the tough 
cases; not, like, rebranding Hitler, ugh,
get out of here with that, but like the time 
a bunch of us, all women and all with sexual trauma 
in our pasts laughed way too hard and too darkly
at someone's joke that rape should really just
be called surprise sex, and someone else said, wheezing,
surprise mandatory sex. It was both not funny
and the funniest fucking thing we'd ever heard,
all of us crying and laughing over cheap merlot, shaking
the coffee table. Years before Me Too, each of us
meeting in this intersection of something terrible,
wielding language, the only weapon we had.
Much later, sitting in a marketing meeting for real,
someone used the phrase household penetration
and I had to excuse myself, hide in the handicapped
stall to laugh hysterically. Ding dong! Open the door,
ma'am, it's just the giant penis here for your household
penetration. Only a man could string together 
those words and give himself a raise. The truth is,
I am a writer who doesn't write often because
the burden of language flattens me most days. 
What a strange cage we've built for ourselves,
us and dolphins. Who are we to impose this prison
onto gorillas—just let them fucking paint. 
Every day I sit at this desk and look out at trees,
try to learn from them. I want to be fluent 
in chemicals and enzymes instead. Let me be 
the cut grass under the mower blade, screaming
in my Morse code of volatile organic compounds, 
and you inhaling deeply overhead, oblivious,
loving that clean green scent of injury. 

__

ANXIETY SUMMER

On days I have therapy,
I clean the car in the morning,
like my doctor might flunk me
if there's sand in the pedals.
I draw a self-portrait, label it
LIVING IS HARD. My mouth
is a slit. I learn geese have teeth
lining their tongues, like dinosaurs.
I wear my fat like it protects
me from my past. I give away
every book I've ever read. I learn
about shipwrecks and U-boats
and icecaps. The basil makes it
to July: one more living thing
to tend. The IRS makes a mistake
and says I owe them money. I tuck
the letter in a drawer and drink.
I call up my aunt to ask what a grown
up would do and she says, Well,
whatever you did do, because
you are a grown-up, which makes
me drink. If I understood
string theory, I might be less anxious.
If the caldera under Yellowstone
grumbles awake. If California
sags into the ocean. If my bear
bell fails me. If all my bones break.
I welcome a disaster like the fall.
I hope it comes for me soon.

__

As for some fun things to check out, if folks dug these language/anxiety poems, they should read [this book] and look at [this list]. The best word, imo, is BACKPFEIFENGESICHT, which translates to "a face badly in need of a fist." Badly! It kills me.