Untitled, or: an ode to my mouth
i) Nothing hurts in quite the same way as biting down on your tongue, or the inside of your cheek. It only ever happens accidentally, as if wires crossed somewhere in your brain, and your teeth clamped down on the wrong thing. In this moment, this short, sharp shock, language itself is stopped in its tracks; mouth slammed shut, unable to articulate the pain that’s been inflicted on itself.
I had a friend in college who would make out with me if, at the end of the night, we didn’t go home with anyone else. The things I remember most about her were the cigarettes she tasted of, and the urgency with which she’d bite my bottom lip, my tongue; the way her teeth scraped along its surface. There was something tender in this; the slowness of it, as if some piece of me was being undressed, to be embraced by the strange sensations of the world. It took more restraint than I would care to admit to avoid prying at any of the small scars that she left behind. I don’t know if the feeling of her lips was pain or pleasure, or if there’s a word for the meeting of those two sensations, polar opposites, somehow
all contained behind thirty-two pearly gates.
ii) My lips are always dry and chapped in winter. No product that I’ve tried has managed to keep them from coming to pieces. When the winter winds are at their most bitter and unforgiving, I swear that I can feel this thin, ever-regenerating piece of myself slipping away in real time. I’m sitting, picking at it now as I (over)think what comes next. I remember reading, once (but I don’t remember where) that we are, in a way, reborn every seven years. That that’s how long it takes for all the cells in our body to regenerate, or be replaced by new ones. I never understood it as science, more as poetry, this feeling of, even internally, never standing still; as if flesh and blood, body and soul, have their own strange rotations and calendars like the sun, moon and stars. I like to imagine that this, like so many other things, begins with the mouth; as if lips and teeth and tongue all open up like blossoming flowers; skin caught on the wind like errant leaves. Opening my mouth wide enough that something can exist within it, down to my throat–where, as a metaphysically uncertain adolescent, I was sure my soul took root—the droning aaahhhh that I can’t help but associate with the dentist’s chair becoming the first note in a transcendent, transforming choir.
iii) I am in a diner in the Village. It’s the first week of the year and I’ve been avoiding the subway because of a stampede in the subway train I took to Broadway the night before. There was an emergency stop, and blurry bodies outside the window of the carriage doors. I don’t know why everyone started running, but they did; it took hold like an airborne contagion. No-one said it but I’m sure the word was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, vibrating just behind their lips: gun. I felt my heart move from my chest up into my throat—maybe it was lying next to my soul—as if each ragged breath tried to force it back down where its supposed to be.
The speakers in the diner are blaring the best of Americana: Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’. The lights are a dim neon, the kind you find in throwback shows that worship at the synthwave altar of the 80s: Carpenter, Spielberg, Russell. In front of me is a burger, and it tastes unlike any that I’ve ever had before. I find my mouth alive to it in ways that surprise me; each bite not only breaking it down but trying to make sense of what it contains, what makes it taste and feel this way. It’s ironic, the sensations that take root within the mouth are much too slippery for something as solid as a word. It is pure sensation; if my mouth is home to anything, it is poetry instead of prose.
—Sam Moore
Participating artists:
Rebecca Ackroyd
Gabriella Boyd
Sylvie Fleury
Phillip Gabriel
R.I.P. Germain
Maggi Hambling
Michael Ho
Sang Woo Kim
Hannah Murray
I.W. Payne
Mike Silva
Jenkin van Zyl
Barbara Wesołowska
at Rose Easton & Ginny on Frederick, London
until March 29, 2025