Discovering Taste
by Natalia G. Sarmiento
René Rivas, Untitled, analog photograph, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
Discovering Taste
Natalia G. Sarmiento
AUG 2026 | Issue 54
FLASH
I discovered the sense of taste when I learned my tongue had a name.
You are born with it: with the wet flesh inside your mouth, with the papillae open, with the body already leaning toward salt, certain skins, certain fruits.
The first tongue was a woman.
Not her name. Not her story. Barely a laugh in my ear.
A nape. The vapor of a body passing beside mine.
The way something in me salivated.
A door in the hairs of my body. A hand beneath the sheet.
I learned to make language from flesh in the dark.
A thirst without a name. But my tongue knew. Hidden, it recognized the taste of an imagined skin.
It recognized hunger. Salt.
It recognized that form of god that does not descend from heaven but from the body.
The second tongue arrived dressed as the world.
It had grammar. It had furniture. It had future, photograph, surname, path, a lamp left on. It was a tongue others understood before I pronounced it. A tongue served on a white plate. A tongue that made no noise at the table.
But even there, beneath the legible, my mouth kept another wetness.
Taste does not disappear.
It is covered. With sugar. With fear. With Sundays. With the invisible vigilance of those who believe a daughter’s body is a room that must be kept open, illuminated, without stains on the sheets.
For years I confused the taste of things.
I thought desire meant choosing between names already written.
I thought the tongue had to obey the shape of the plate.
Until the third tongue arrived.
It was not born from a person, but from a crack.
It had no grammar. No gender. No altar. It did not know how to say forever, or only this, or never that. It did not organize desire the way one organizes doctrine. It was a wild tongue, before and after, made of sweat, saliva, nape, thigh, low voice, skin raised before touch.
A tongue without a dictionary.
What scent opens you.
What laugh leaves you defenseless.
What body turns the mouth to water.
What presence makes you remember you were born animal before daughter, before name, before story.
I did not develop a taste for a gender.
I developed taste.
Or perhaps I recovered it.
The taste for the salt of someone loved. For the wet shadow of a mouth. For the tremor that rises from below and disorders the sentence.
I have loved with my mouth closed and with my mouth open.
I have loved in secret, in hunger, in envy, in tenderness.
I have loved what my tongue recognized before I could defend it.
And still, sometimes, a woman laughs near me and everything returns: the first wetness, the first cave, the first music.
The tongue was never confused.
The world was.
Natalia G. Sarmiento is a writer and change designer based in Mexico City, where she works on how people move through transformation. She writes Materia Prima, a Substack of essays, poetry, and visual notes in Spanish and English, grounded in the practice of writing from the body. Her work moves across speculative fiction, essay, and poetry, in forms that fold rather than progress, returning to what a life carries and what it decides to set down. She is at work on a memoir about violence, stolen memory, and the long work of re-inhabiting a body.
René Rivas is a post-producer and photographer based in Mexico City. His practice moves between editing, postproduction, photography, and design.