Jennifer, I love how your work in the later two weeks has become so associative and the work you’ve done to take leaps from one image to the other. Like in your earlier two pieces, this poem also is doing a great job of moving from one image to another while also building a larger world around them.

 

I love this poem’s final image and how it connects with the “topography” and the dentist’s comment. I wonder if now that you have this great, weighty ending, you might go back to your earlier images and hint toward this meaning? I think the juxtaposition of the weirdness of the tongue, it’s map-like lines and the way it grosses others out—though also is used in tender moments, as you hint it—with what it can do is a really interesting meditation. Can you weave that meditation into the poem earlier? Are there images that might do double duty? The image of the student seems like an opportunity for this—a truth-telling student who dies from a cancer of the tongue. –S.