The Salt Craving, and: If Smoke Could Sing Wesley Rothman (bio) after Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker How you speak the words changes them. Salt peanuts in a whispered hum signalselegy, a mourning. A raspy squeal makes them a punch- line: arbitrary nuts salted,strolling. I hear the earth in them roasting, hear them spread across my tongue, nakedand gnashed to pieces. And the sting— salt dissolves the slick sidewalks, seasons just about everything, bitesand bites back after every bite, torturing the tongue. I scoop another handful because I need the lash of language. So I lash my mind with the ingenuity we have for salt. Preserve flesh. Sterilize soil. Makethe wound. Pack the wound. Torture is a salted imagination. Didn’t I [End Page 144] horn you about punch lines? Didn’tI line you up, punch you with my horn? salt Peanuts! salt Peanuts! Don’t you understandevery note is a grain of blue salt I’m dropping on the tongue, because you want it that badly, over and again? If Smoke Could Sing history would be more reliable every bite of meat would tell you a story maybe we’d be better listeners we would call them song-bombs or song-grenades hurled into a crowd how loud would the sound rise we would smell music all the burning buildings and crematoriums what more might become ash perhaps leaving the beloved would be less of a shock snuff me now. [End Page 145] Wesley Rothman Wesley Rothman’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Review, Mississippi Review, Narrative, and New England Review, among other venues. Recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, he works with Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, and American Microreviews and Interviews. Roth-man teaches throughout Boston. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press