Song, and: Connecticut, and: My Brother Does Not Return for My Mother’s Fiftieth

Abstract

Song, and: Connecticut, and: My Brother Does Not Return for My Mother’s Fiftieth Tawanda Mulalu (bio) Song Forgive myself for breath and I should die.Self-love an excuse but for that exit: this daydreamof me ended. Of feet parched with weight beyondthe hurt of pale bathroom scale. Or love thisitch between thighs as slower metabolism giftsslower moods, these dull penetrations of faceinto pillowcase. So die then, says another countryor lover; splits me long through thoughts of this spine.And a dream of nerve cells copying beneath this glass.How inexact to possess skin. Like a flailing sacktoo stuffed with consciousness. I feel as a piñataand you are peckish. Not just the promise of guns shotbut allergic itch draws blood in late summer. I’m sorryother Black men died. I’m sorry I keep thinking,I look like him. I’m sorry my life feels as easyas these leaves failing to defend themselves againsttheir too-soon shifting colors. But I want myself.I want to want myself as much as I want your shadowsflickering against the walls of this cave, fooling meof presences beyond myself. And this music: I want thisfoolishness of my mouth transmuted into woodwindand brass. As if this could salve. As if this grass betweenmy lips epistles this gray sky as any virtue but failed rain.As if peaches. Forgive myself for breath and this songshould die. I am as new as the paintings in this cave.Am the same burrowing of grain into body and loss.Am the same ochre and hematite, inevitable and sorry. [End Page 18] Connecticut Mornings, his wife could not remember who my face was.Her face stared at me with a mushy smile while Henry ate the same corn flakes with bananas. I watched the yellow flakesuncrisping in his bowl of milk, his gums too soft to bear them. Henry then put me to work on his “fields.” I don’t know whofirst said it. Probably, his teeth cackled “fields” to his friend who visited him—limping gently—as Henry rolled around in hisred tractor. It roared through his backyard, funneling narrow lanes into the black, hot soil. Waddling after him in my white sneakers,I held blue seeds of grass that pricked my fingers. I tossed them over the soil like a flower girl. “Why are they blue?” I asked him.“Fertilizer coating,” he said. “Dry, mutant rice,” said my fizzy mind. Nights—they opened with heavy sweat—he would sit and watchFox News blare. Me next to him, reading a long novel on suffering. But he shouldn’t have paid me as a gardener. I dug about as wellas a child in a sandbox—shallow, amazed by my skinny handling of that spade. Its crusted rust as dark as my dry skin. No, Henry paidmy hands to hold his loneliness. To hear him. I needed a place to stay. He liked to hear me singing off-key in the mornings, taking longcold showers. And walk down these stairs to him: aging, waiting to plant more blue seeds. [End Page 19] My Brother Does Not Return for My Mother’s Fiftieth Egg that could but did not quite, I see you in theirmuseums, the coal-dark African masks, your blank face. To not find you walking with me with thesestolen faces, to not find you crawling up from dust— I left you landlocked with our parents, heard tidesbefore my body, wet axes carving shore to noise, and who has ever rescued the drive home? Washedmy crusted hands and what—stubborn grains. Dried my hands with a cold towel, your little hands driedbut could not hold their shores—though other grains now live between your fingers. This world will nothold little hands but turned to dust. At this party, I sip on bitter-dark drink, bearing warm speecheswhile your body turns to airlessness. My thoughts on this glass, roundedness of your once new skullI never saw. My flight returns to their shores. Your face escapes me...