When language fails: When language fails and Grand Central osculates, I am at the fulcrum. The Cape Lookout shutters shores at the local Shoney’s. I hit the Selma city limit, then North Carolina. When language fails, it doesn’t just stumble. It skids a few times, sees the jagged sidewalk, continues anyway. It trips a whole of eight times before descending –– actually, plummeting to some finite fiasco. When language fails, Hardee’s charbroiled burgers 5-piece combo crumbles in the ridges of my fingerprint. Actually, the letters of the poster. It is not me, no longer my proximity in the gas station parkway. Nor the sting of my aunt’s Chicles. Mente Fuerte. It is more the erasure of the words. When language fails, I don’t want to hear that ‘language is culture.’ A language, in a country that has no word for its people. Estadounidense. I am driving the vehicle right now. How Caribbean Spanish will never rip itself free from the tongue of its conquerors. I am no manipulator of a language that most times makes me mute for three days. A device that, in trying to break away from it, skips and trips unto itself. A language I am inescapable from. When language fails me, that is the extent of it all. There is no flailing of the clothes I’d rather have burned. There is no identifiable word for abandoned tires on I-95. The car I am in passes an ad: "Weekend Getaway: South of the Border, 103 Miles.” There is no highway exit away from the mechanism bending my mouth. To shoo it away is a only a summon.
When language fails, I would like a translation of each of my mother’s hand motions.
Watching the desire fill in her, to flail her arms, manifest itself more like her tongue twisting her arms behind her neck. That is more like it. Maybe the answer is Pig Latin. The language I know most is the void air of a child socked by a kickball during PE. My language keeps scoring, and I am a sore loser.