‘The Blank Tongue’ by Julie Irigaray

It is very easy
to forget a language –
one day you’re a sponge absorbing
everything around,
the next a colander.
A language quickly gets rusty
and turns into a treacherous nail
carrying the tetanus of the tongue.

I lost my Spanish during the territorial
expansion of my English.
I thought my vocabulary had been
stored, mapped somewhere
at the back of my baffled brain,
but my memory has wiped
it out like a tractor ploughing a wasteland.
What an unfruitful harvest –

It is really easy
to forget a language,
especially a third or fourth one.
I erased my Italian
verbs and daily-life sentences
like chalk words written
on a blackboard as soon
as I left the country.

It is so easy
to forget a language
that you can even forget
your mother tongue.
My French is mixed with
overseas swearwords,
I misspell false friends with
the diction of a drunkard.

From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017

About the Author
Julie Irigaray’s publication credits include Southword, Shearsman, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence, The Ofi Press (Mexico) and Every Writer (USA). She won third prize in the 2017 Winchester Writers’ Festival Poetry Competition, and was shortlisted for the Yeovil Poetry Prize 2017 and the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2016.