“How to Say Fish” by Shari Zollinger
I’d already mastered chopsticks
you’d already freed
my tongue
from its cloister
coaxing it to say
yú for the first time
while we ate—
Taipei night
slurping marrow
you performed Bopomofo
explaining
even with your teeth
how to say
fish
let the tongue lie
quiet as soy
let the ginger
open, only then—
will it bend for you
in parse in tandem
we made sounds
for the first time
a new pronunciation
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Shari Zollinger Artist Statement:
I call myself a poet, a term I’ve grown into slowly, carefully, hopefully. My creative expression moves as collage, arranging and rearranging language until it fits, until it stands on its own. Through poetry, I have come to trust the elliptical, its style of obscurity, brevity, and deliberate omission. I am interested in memory and the epigenetic seam between self and the past. There, I sometimes find a traveler — a former self, an ancestor, a voice — seeking communion, offering itself as muse.
This poem belongs to a larger manuscript about coming of age in Taiwan and learning a second language. It also traces my encounter, years later, with the work of the late, queer writer Qiu Miaojin. I approach her writing not as claimant or conduit, but as a reader conscious of distance and shaped by it.
