Spawn
Danielle Lea Buchanan
The mouth is a salt water pond. The tongue does not have gills or fins or a tail so isn’t a salmon. But it still escapes out the mouth to spawn upstream. To spawn, meaning to find its original birthplace to make babies. Every year, 67,854 red tongues (really just wads of saliva, nerves and blood wrapped in a layer of skin as thin as a latex balloon) swim 784 miles up the muddy Kenai River. Because exercise is increased, blood flow increases, and the eight muscles of the tongue:
1.genioglossus
2.hyoglossus
3.styloglossus
4.palatoglossus
5.superior longitudinal
6.inferior longitudinal
7.verticalis
8.transversus
increase to the size of an alligator’s tail. Hair growth acts as receptor tentacles, or eyes. It is not uncommon for the tongue to get caught between the banks of the Kenai. Eels and lamprey suction to the tongue to ride upstream. Though most tongues die from exhaustion, others dig themselves in little holes under gravel to wait for love. When a male is found, the tongues knot every tentacle together. The tongues fuck. Blow bubbles underwater. The female tongue develops white balls of fur on her underneath. This is not gonorrhea, but babies. They bud salt to salt, sugar to sugar, bitter to bitter, sour to sour and lick one another until both split open in hemorrhage. Blood, saliva, white balls of fur, and yellow strings of nerves float downstream in shallow fresh water. Soon to be eaten by a raccoon.
DANIELLE LEA BUCHANAN pursues poetry in Baton Rouge.
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| Start With Steak | |
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| Rose Hunter :: | [taxi] |
| Gary Every :: | Popes on Bicycles |
| Bethany Haug :: | Love in the Park |
| Danielle Lea Buchanan :: | Spawn |
| Lewis Gesner :: | Black Ball |
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| Unreal | |
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| Adler Planetarium on a Weekend | |
| James Valvis :: | Poem Composed Entirely With Last Lines from James Dickey Poems 1 & 2 |
| T.J. O'Donnell :: | Morning Shift |
| Handmade in Alaska | |
| Emily Glossner Johnson :: | Vladimir Lenin Grown Weary |
| Meg Eden :: | An Old Man Sighted, Planting Poinsettias |
Homage to the Strange Spirits
| Kenneth Patchen :: | Picture Poems |