What's On Your Tongue Poem by Carly Haufe

Machines hop metal shavings scarring your perfect fingertips
grinding, burning, burrowing into your skin, you're hard as nails,
heart of molten iron, no tougher stuff than can lose and lose it all
and still have the salt to throw the dice again,
and your tears, when they do come for they come so rare and spare
like the rain in our July droughts to our rotten rivers,
make the grass stand tall after it's been beaten and come with lightning and
taste sweet like snow-
and you will always be that smell in your nose of warm and rusty metal sweating
and hot baked oldtown bricks, pillows of our brothers, and
curling spirals of toxic dust kicked up by muscle-car motors in the
longday endlessheat that rolls into the pink-lit night
and i'm sure as sure you'll always have that lead weight on your tongue
that makes O's longer than long and L's come rolling, lying in turgid waters,
up out of muddy depths at high tide and
wrap themselves around the pilings and
I's come sharp as knives
because that sound, that gnaw, will never leave your mouth
and the lights at night on the river come from your eyes
and there's alot of broken hearts lying around,
grinding beneath skatersneaks like busted, powdered glass
and everytime a streetlamp gutters out an Angel gets his wings-
but there's hearts, too, that flash like neon pink bunnies
against the night
and there's sacraments of whiskey beneath the bridges
and malt liquor lifted up to multiply the light
where i've kneeled and maybe will be put on my knees again
to sing another prayer that echoes all the way out into the bay and
into time itself
from a place where we are kings on thrones of shale and grain and biohazard barrels
our very blood rushes to rust and begs for quarter from the relentless onslaught,
but there are bats and foxes and cats with eyes of emerald and
deer like ghosts, and reverberations of sighs and memories and
multitudes of sparrows and sometimes the moon is so fat and
hangs so low and full and heavy so
we can just hook our hands inside its craters and swing from its lip
and we will always be swinging after that

Burning out hot and fast and bright as fireworks
we're each of us looking for our own way to stop time.
From the gutters and the rooftops of this city
we own the sky.