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sound bytes

by Ava Blu



replace my throat with a tape recorder
to capture the words I cannot speak

I never seem to have anything to say
at those moments
when your head is full of
orange-glazed marmalade

and it oozes through the slits between my teeth.

03/20/2007

Posted on 03/21/2007
Copyright © 2025 Ava Blu

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Gabriel Ricard on 03/22/07 at 03:54 AM

Again, with a lot of your work, you seem to put everything into every single line, in such a way that some could easily stand as a strong statement all on their own. This one's very much in that spirit.

Posted by Richard Paez on 03/25/07 at 02:47 PM

Particularly beautiful. There is a strange moment - when the "I" in the poem becomes this intra-poetic "your" ("my throat… your head... my teeth") - that really makes this poem for me. It's an enthralling You-I-We slide, a very sexual moment, especially with the image of the orange marmalade oozing through the speaker’s (reader’s?) teeth. The overwhelming sweet-stickiness of the marmalade, pleasant in moderation but rendered here disturbing, softly violent and strangely biological; the focus on the non-space, negative-space, a-dental slits between teeth; the cyborg, again flirtingly sexual image of replacing the throat (noticeably the throat, not the voice-box, the Adam’s apple, or the larynx, but the throat, the body’s hybrid between womb canal and anus) with a tape-recorder, a machine that can only repeat, replay, record sound (not voice). This is beautiful Jeanna. Thanks for sharing it.

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