A strange, soft creature rests tethered
in my mouth, gentle aesthete, wet
and bumpy, discerning shades of salt,
sweet, bitter, sour beyond any practical
necessity, understandably alarmed
by the occasional taco de lengua,
more so by the sharp incisors sharing
its space, but still making its modest
contribution to speech, not sibilants
or fricatives, of course, nor obviously
plosives, but going great guns with glottals
and dreaming of growing long and blue
as a giraffe’s grazing among thorn trees,
hoping to find another to be its friend.
Hunt Hawkins is Professor Emeritus at the University of South Florida. Winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, his book, The Domestic Life, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, Poet Lore, Plume, Epoch, and many other journals. He has lived in Norway, Myanmar, Tanzania, and Poland where he taught as a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In Tampa, he is active in local and state poetry groups and has served as President of several organizations, including the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.
