Words that get stuck:
when umbrella glen breakfast fifty bird
anything to do with the word ‘gut’

My father didn’t give me his blue eyes
he gave me his stutter.
He said he was cured when he went to camp at age 10
when he was sent somewhere up in Wisconsin,
where all camps like these are, in the seclusion of forests and dirt,
nothing that talks back or pretends to listen.
They had good meat loaf and made him talk real slow
and with a lot of breath but he never explained, really,
how he was cured.

I imagined each boy and girl cured, walking across tree logs
uttering words like “bluebird” with those hard, consonants
and “daffodil”, double f’s hiding, trembling under the lower lip.
Words would drip down their chins like syrup and feed the animals
with their sound.

When I was ten I asked my father if I could go to that camp
but he said it wasn’t there anymore.
In the Mediterranean, then? Surely they can cure this
in the Mediterranean, I said.
Anyone who can say that word surely can’t stutter.

So in sixth grade I gave the longest two-minute report on
John F. Kennedy ever, stumbling over every consonant
dragging them like fingers across a radiator.
And at sixteen I boiled some hot water in my mother’s kettle

and dipped my tongue in like a tea bag.
I took a breath, opened my mouth and watched the silent bird
escape into the repeating night.

Words I hate:
can believe bottle my Lisa confidence blink

I still dread telling people my name, even talking at all.
Most don’t notice it anymore; I’ve gotten good at hiding it:
the guttural swallowing I do just before I spit out the damaged sound,
the contorting I do in my throat, where no one can see,
wishing I could be somewhere in the Mediterranean
with a myriad of birds perched on my arms, saying
“My name is Lisa. My name is Lisa. My name is Lisa” like a spoken song.

08/20/2004

Author's Note: This poem was published in The North American Review in 2001.

Posted on 08/20/2004
Copyright © 2024 Lisa Marie Brodsky