“radio chatter” by Winston Lê

July 25, 2024

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “radio chatter” by Winston Lê. Due to its formatting, this poem is only available as an image.

radio chatter

By Winston Lê

on operator’s end of conch shell’s phonic ocean query mermaid song recording we are tok auris sssssussssurratesssss seashell resonance into ears of echolalia ensemble earshot to earshot hearsay betrays word of mouth between babble & murmur-perception we interrupt child’s play of broken telephone vessels we are unreliable whisper-chorus wiretap & garble-narrate— we static-alter oral transcript of aurality co bac lalia-radios pair together tele-séance we mishear receptive transmission-chain— whisperer#1: co gnate— whisperer#2: clockwork— whisperer#3: is everything all co pacetic— we scatter possessed pronunciations shatter phonetic soundproof glass co bac transfigured viêt-vocals tendril c’s rounded form mutates into g’s looped-serif cartilage— drawbridge-lower tongue across pre-corpus breath co we guttural-utter go upon lip-threshold voiced velar plosive gggghosts bac out of service— we transmute into spiral radio instrumentalizes fluid-filled vibrations throughout inner ear upon procession’s terminus— we error-forge across tongue-betwixt we annunciate final transliteration echo go back—

Copyright © Winston Lê

Winston Lê is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in periodicities, Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filling Station. His poetic practice encompasses different modalities concerned with language acquisition, including receptive bilingualism, poetic dictation, speculative poetics, and asemic writing. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries and Michigan State University Libraries, respectively.

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