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we eat our own tongues              wash off the dirt the villagers flung                        coat them in flour ground by our foreign                                 hands   season with kauderwelsch and fry the fuck out of them                mother plates them garnished                                    with unspeakable accents                                            her hair coiffed in the style all the ladies in the village wear   father’s palate thick with a dialect                                       that cannot be excised                                               takes out his otherness   puts it in a glass on the sill                                                             where it grins at passer-by    this is how we eat: swallowing   the light filtered by the jalousie stripes us all in sun                     and shade   outside a single peal of the big bronze bell                                        announces a quarter past normal                                                                            the scraping of knives and forks on plates up and down                              the streets echoing like mechanical birdsong    sister pours sips of her blood    into our mouths from a cup made of a gold                                                 so lustrous it makes the future seem impossibly    bright   brother leans back    balancing on the hind legs of his chair   stuck             in the moment of falling    his mouth open                                      full of broken                                                          swings stolen from the playground                                                                                        behind the house where we lived this is us   mealtimes are holy and we the congregation                                   knees studded with gravel are learning                                               how to pray again   to mortal gods   with dirty hands                                                      with chipped off teeth   and accents thick as bunker walls   made of bread