Topography of a Tongue early draft with feedback from online prose poetry instructor 

In my bathroom mirror, I stick out my 10-centimeter by Do you need “by”? 60-gram movable organ second-grader style and flinch. Back when I wore pigtails and bows, I screeched gross! at the sight of my mother inspecting hers. She shrugged, said skedaddle. Now middle-aged, mine, too, resembles volcanic rock. Nice image! A long, indented line snakes down its center with smaller ones angling off to the sides like complex sentence diagrams. When I ask my husband to peek, he shrieks ew! until I remind him Here’s a place where you might cut down the exposition. Could “until I remind him” be just “though” or “but”? he has lovingly lick-kissed that tongue for twenty-eight years. He shrugs, says sweet dreams Do we need the previous sentence? What does it add to the meditation on the tongue. Lights out, I stew Woody Allen style. Is it normal to feel your tongue? Am I normal? No such thing as normal. Last year, my far-from-normal I’m not sure about this tangent about normalcy. Since the student died of tongue-cancer, she is already connected to the meditation of the tongue. “No such thing as normal” is a bit of a cliché, and you contradict that statement by calling the student “far-from-normal.” writing student who never held back from telling her truth died of tongue cancer. At the dentist, I sit in the vinyl chair, twiddle thumbs, open wide. I also wonder here about the vinyl chair and twiddling thumbs. What are they adding? Can you imply open wide, then jump to the dentist’s reaction? She prods, proclaims aha, a geography tongue! Exotic images flash: mountains and oceans, world maps, spinning globes. Lines flicker from Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go about bang-ups and hang-ups and balancing acts. Is my lyrical body part tingling to get my attention? In bed, it calls me Atlas: do you hold up the heavens with grace or bear its burden?