A Poem by Gareth Prior

De amico (ma tresduce et tresamé)

no sooner breathed macaronic
than your Middle French
kiss with its Latin cauda
tongue-ties the English sun & we’re
already late for lunch
with the in-laws mid-pandemic

imagine switching language
like tone mouth-to-mouth
skirting the city walls
(a shortcut in killer heels
as the line-breaks catch
their breath

at your silhouette in the exit) –
that cauda a hymn-refrain though the form’s
European epistolary
give me a language-family
any day & it’s curtains
if they mention Br–

but their blunt farce belongs
to a different genre linger
on that multilingual spell:
love me so that I it fele
as desire
slips between tongues

Gareth Prior is the author of The First Branch (Contraband, 2021), Scattered Ashes (Oystercatcher, 2020), ibant obscuri (KFS, 2019), and Erinys: Three Studies (Oystercatcher, 2016). His poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Modern Poetry in Translation, POEM Magazine, and other places. By day he is Bursar and Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.