bitten nom by myself 051125 ... birdmad by kittens 051125 ... flux na, bitte.. 061024 ... flux a small bat? 061202 ... nom ha! 061202 ... ovenbird I was seven years old, spending Christmas with cousins I rarely saw who lived in a farmhouse in the country. I loved it there. You had to wear rubber boots to go out into the barn which made me feel like Fern from Charlotte's_Web. We played Crokinole until the nails on our index fingers developed bruises underneath. We piled our plates high with ambrosia salad and called it dinner. During this particular visit I was running around the house with a cousin about my age when I slipped on the wooden steps and fell, chin first, onto the kitchen floor. My top incisors went through my tongue like it was a chicken cutlet. There was blood. A lot of it. I don’t remember screaming, but I must have. It seems that the direct aftermath of nearly severing my tongue from my mouth has been put in that brain vault where trauma goes. But I remember standing in my cousin’s bedroom, putting on my pyjamas for the night, and repeatedly sticking my tongue out in front of a mirror so I could watch the flesh split along the brand new fault line I had cleaved into it. As I grew older I learned how to bite my tongue in less messy, but just as damaging, ways. I learned that speaking my mind meant sideways glances, and eating alone at lunch time, and not getting invited to parties, and never going on a date. I got quieter. I made a prison of my teeth and kept my tongue locked inside. I could feel the place where scar tissue knit that muscle back together. For a long time, when my tongue touched my palate in an attempt to make the shape of language, I tasted blood. 250903 ... raze i used to make a meal of my own meat, softening the skin on the crease of my thickest finger before tearing it away with my teeth. what lived beneath the unfastened flesh was pink and raw, like a chick too young to leave the egg. the pain was such a small price to pay for finding a small pocket of peace in the marrow of embattled boyhood. 250903 what's it to you? who go blather from