A poem by April Salzano

Swollen Tongue

It’s been that kind of day. Your

girlfriend, in from Milwaukee, woke

with a swollen tongue, unable to spit

or swallow, but maybe able to talk,

our eight year old tells me later. Pulled from under

covers, untangled, I drove 83 miles to relieve you

of our sons. They had been with you nearly

24 hours. Too long. Your reasoning:

something about $3.00 in gas she had

no car she flew here we are moving to

Wisconsin together tomorrow temporarily and if

you are getting remarried anyway, we would

like to live in your house just deed it back. Her tongue

is what? Three dollars

won’t get you to

your destination. The line I drew

2 years ago is beginning

to blur. You know nothing of my repeat

mammogram tomorrow, of dense

heterogenous fibroglandular tissue or

nodular asymmetry present in the anterosuperior

right breast, the one that provided consistently

2 ounces less at each nursing, and dried up

2 years before the left. You know nothing of

the fact that my sister won’t babysit

tomorrow because she is getting her picture taken

for the church directory. Of aloneness.

Of unfortunate dependency relieved only

by the mercy of others. Of the crying in the backseat

from Knox, westward across I-80, all the way to Mercer,

for the misrepresentation of both history

and current events. Of the magnitude of misperception.

Her swollen tongue is beckoning like an emergency,

to which I, to which you, to which our children, must

respond as if it once provided their sustenance.

April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg, Pyrokinection, Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Rainbow Rose, The Camel Saloon, The Applicant, The Mindful Word, Napalm and Novocain and is forthcoming in Jellyfish Whispers, The South Townsville Micro Poetry Journal, and Inclement. She is working on her first collection of poetry and an autobiographical novel examining the beauty and pain involved in raising a child with Autism.