And by speaking in tongues I mean this

Sarah Amsler

Here I am spilling ink mapping the trails 
towards your mouth of your mumblings 
thinking maybe this from behind as they go,
is how we will touch us.
writing you orchestra
Not making marks all its voices entangled
not breaking skin attuning your tongues
not lining you so to play everything is,
mottled and hard this and its others
with wordwounds the patient longing 
that slowbleed between notes a
not-quiteness, rhythm stitching
not angled and edging us here.
not drying in shallows
but fingering into And then rolling
beneaths and betweens, particle wave whisper
exhaling waters across the teeth
through membranes of your soul

that shift shape into still wet
beats where words to the touch
conjure not yet you glide into
and nearly. my mouth
and breathe
I am seeping thick hush now
prayer to say I am
feeling you alter there is
tracing truths nothing
as you stutter to say.

The Science

As Amy Catanzano writes, ‘physicists, like poets, think through and with multiple forms of language.’ This poem proposes a quantum metabolic intimacy which operates through forms of communication and connection that don’t rely on words or touch – here, travelling through the metaphor of ink travelling through a body and a life. I think we sometimes hope that human language (especially metaphor) will shrink not only physical or emotional distance, but the atomic field that fundamentally both separates and tethers us. For quantum physics tells us that we never physically ‘touch’ anything. Particles of matter are attracted to particles with an opposite charge, so atoms’ electrons repel each other. What we feel when we touch is the electromagnetic force between our body and another. Yet the theory of quantum entanglement says that two or more particles can also form such a strong connection that they will influence each other ongoingly, even if they are light years apart. I have indulged in fantasising that quantum communication could one day make long-distance human loving of family, friends, lovers and strangers easier. This poem, however, suggests that we would be better off attending to how human beings are always-already in deeper relation with each other and our nonhuman kin through metabolic, kinetic and spiritual languages of living, dying and becoming otherwise together. Its addressee could be a person, a river or a cherry fruit; organic or ancestral. Learning through queer ecology how beings communicate across dimensions in many languages at once is helping me reconsider what it means to ‘be in touch’ with others in the universe. It offers metaphors of queer communication and ‘insensible’ but very real connection to convey an erotics of metabolic care, and intimates that loosening attachments to both linguistic representation and empirical touch can expand our capacity to experience it.

The Poet

Sarah Amsler (they/them) is a US-born researcher, writer and educator who lives in Portugal and is tethered in relation elsewhere. They work at the intersections of decolonial thinking, queer ecology, somatic poetics and radical pedagogy. They enjoy mixing experiential and scientific knowledges, social theory and wordplay to alchemize ways of knowing that glide between molecular, fleshy and cosmic scales. They also write as a way of getting intimate with the erotics of possibility in abandoned places, and to shine light on vital hidden worlds such as mycorrhizal fungi, colonial erasures, shame and love.

Next poem: Betrayals by M. Benjamin Thorne