Speech Therapy by Scott Corbet Riley

I was born 

on December 23, 1985 

forty-one minutes 

past midnight 

in Santa Teresa

Hospital off Cottle Rd. 

in San Jose, CA my parents 

brought me home 

on Christmas Day 

in a large red stocking 

with a piece 

of holly embroidered 

onto its white

jagged fringe—our four-bedroom

two-bath house 

on Lenora Ave. 

with its redwood 

and Chinese pistache my father

was nine years younger 

than I am now

I couldn’t 

hear that first year

got tympanostamy 

tubes at thirteen months

and suddenly 

every breath 

was startling 

each voice 

a raucous 

maelstrom of vowels 

I learned 

to speak 

by counting 

letters on the color

coded carpet 

repeating

until I understood 

how each sound 

felt the way 

it twanged against 

glottis and larynx I spoke

then as if 

in a foreign 

language but the language 

wasn’t foreign 

but language 

itself.

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Scott Corbet Riley holds a Ph.D. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz and a B.A. in Rhetoric and Creative Writing from UC Berkeley. His poems and essays have appeared in Rattle, Berkeley Poetry Review, Yemassee, and the Walt Whitman Quarterly, among other publications, and he has taught at UC Santa Cruz, Foothill College and Lake Washington Institute of Technology. He currently lives on Mercer Island, Washington, and teaches Latin at Lakeside School in Seattle.