Foreign Words

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A poem about speech after rupture: the struggle to find language that does not wound. In “Foreign Words,” Georgia Shreve moves from sonic violence to emotional precision, rejecting language that “clash[es] and crash[es]” in favor of words that can hold intimacy without harm.

First published:

In “Messages Never Sent”

Published in

In “Foreign Words,” Shreve writes a plea for a different vocabulary of closeness, one that can survive conflict, distance, and memory. The poem opens with refusal, “Speak to me not / In foreign words,” establishing estrangement not as geography but as tone: language becomes “dissonant,” “dissident,” and physically painful to hear.

From there, the poem pivots toward desire rather than accusation. The speaker asks for thought before speech, for language that is “solid as stone,” then widens into startling urban imagery, “public bathrooms,” “raw sewage,” “exposed plumbing,” to describe what language becomes when it is careless, performative, or degraded. The closing movement reaches backward to tenderness, recalling a former intimacy in which words were “delicate as cologne,” then vanishing “like our past.” The result is a poem about communication as both ruin and repair.

Foreign Words

By Georgia Shreve

Speak to me not
In foreign words,
Twisted in your mouth,
Dissonant words
That hurt my ears,
Dissident words.
Speak to me in thoughts
That cannot shift or quake—
Solid as stone, stable as rock.
Do not speak words
That clash and crash
Like boulders rushing down a hill.
Speak to me only
In broken codes,
Not in language brief as graffiti,
Public as bathrooms,
Raw sewage,
From the exposed plumbing
Of your brain.
Speak to me now

As once you did
(As I know you can)
In words as delicate as cologne,
Intimate as sweat,
That evaporate on contact
Like our past.

Reading Notes

What gives “Foreign Words” its intensity is the way it treats language as material, not abstraction. Words in this poem are not neutral carriers of meaning. They are sonic objects that can bruise, collide, and corrode. The opening refusal is immediate and bodily, the speaker’s ears are hurt, the mouth is twisted, and speech itself becomes a site of strain. Shreve frames communication as something felt first in the body, only then in intellect.

The poem’s architecture is built on imperative repetition, “Speak to me… / Do not speak… / Speak to me only… / Speak to me now.” This rhythm creates emotional pressure while also revealing vulnerability. The speaker is not merely criticizing another person’s diction. She is trying to engineer conditions under which understanding can still happen. The commands are a form of desperation disguised as control.

One of the poem’s strongest moves is its metaphorical range. It travels from geology, “solid as stone,” “boulders rushing,” to urban decay, “graffiti,” “public bathrooms,” “raw sewage,” “exposed plumbing.” That descent is deliberate. Shreve shows how language can collapse from permanence into contamination, from structure into spill. The imagery is coarse by design, refusing decorative lyricism when the emotional reality is dirty, public, and uncontained.

Yet the poem does not end in degradation. Its final turn toward memory introduces a different register, fragrant, intimate, fleeting. “Words as delicate as cologne, / Intimate as sweat” creates a striking duality: refinement and body, distance and proximity, artifice and skin. The last line, “Like our past,” is devastating precisely because it is understated. What is mourned is not only a relationship, but a shared idiom that no longer exists.

In that sense, “Foreign Words” is a poem about relational translation. “Foreign” does not mean another language; it means language that no longer belongs to the people speaking it. The poem asks a difficult question: what happens when two people still have words, but no longer share a voice. Its answer is unresolved, but clear in its longing: speak, but speak in a way that lets us remain human to each other.