I remember how:

mysterious sounds pulled me away
from monotony and norm, and how

taster sounds got chewed and lashed
inside my cheeks, right to left, and

the crowded sounds I shooed away
I had to, to hold one still for a test.

I remember how:

hot sounds sizzled out of
their designated boxes, and how

hardworking sounds shifted around
a 24-hour roster burning first words

and when sounds shouted over fences
or whispered in waiting rooms, I paused.

I remember how:

misunderstood sounds smiled
in unspoken but familiar tongues, and

how I didn’t count vocabulary for fear of
freezing meaning, for fear of no discovery

and how I ran through polyphonic homes,
around creaking ships and buzzing planes.

Later, I learned:

That a first language interfered
with second-language acquisition.
(Ah, the presumption of a first language.)
Now, we say it’s an additional language.

That Italianisation shamed dialects.
That assimilation shamed languages.
(So we were polyglots, not bilinguals.)
Now, our last languages are endangered.

I remember:

they were flowers and shells in our mouths.

**

Caterina Mastroianni is an Italian-born Australian poet and educator raised in Port Kembla and Wollongong, on the land of the Wadi Wadi people of the Dharawal nation. She has published poetry in various literary magazines and four Australian anthologies, most recently in Live Encounters Poetry and Writing, Burrow, and Poetry for the Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures . She lives in Sydney on the land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation.

Another work by Caterina Mastroianni
‘Where the shell takes me’
appears in the print version of P76 Issue 9
available for $20 (plus postage and handling)
from Rochford Cottage Bookshop

P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/ displacement/ diaspora/ odyssey: On-line Edition. Table of Contents

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