It's not difficult to imagine a line. First, close your eyes. Remember when you were a child and noticed everything about the world: the light stretching just so across the baseball field, the white ... [+]
R. A. Allen's poem, "The Newcomer," was originally published in Short Edition’s September '19 Rendez-Vous. R. A.'s poetry has appeared in RHINO, The Penn Review, JAMA, Amuse-Bouche, Glassworks, and many others. He lives in Memphis, a city of light and sound. More at https://poets.nyq.org/poet/raallen
This dictionary defines "rooihout" as a South African tree on page 2624; "aasvogel," a vulture, is on page 2— catnip for armchair etymologists, crankbait for obsessive logophiles. But for sheer phonetics, a melodious contender from globalization's onslaught might be Russia's "novichok" (newcomer). What a ring it has, what a sound! It peacocks its "nova"-ness in its initial syllables, and then, like the triumphant dismount of a Soviet gymnast, there's the wallop of that "chok" at the end— a cellar door of a word if ever there was one. But it turns out that novichok is a nerve-agent WMD whos