Owen Ojo

When I learn about the homeland for the first time, nobody tells me that I should see *home*. A teacher pulls down the map of the world, then the map of the continent, and taps with the black tip of her pointer. “Africa,” she says, and like magic the classroom turns a Sahara-sun yellow, something called tribal print bordering the walls, my sister said, pointing through the doorway; and in a few months she is learning to say jambo, we are beating pellet drums against our legs, she is sent home with a letter to give to our parents asking them to bring African food on World Culture Day. I sit on the floor by the stove, my tongue to the hard scratchy surface of the pellet drum, smoky-tasting, hide-flavored, and worriedly watch my mother make a rice that will be served to our classmates at school in the cafeteria, in huge aluminum pans, in front of the teacher who pulls down maps of the world and its continents, who sent home the letter. (Can your family make us some African food?)



On the day my sister is wearing a shirt, lemon-yellow, Africa-yellow, and on the day I am not wearing a yellow shirt but I cannot let my sister be the only one here, I cannot let these people shit on my mother’s cooking. I hover by the station, armpits damp with anxiety over our classmates who cannot eat the rice because it is too spicy—meaning too peppery—which my mother stubbornly dishes out to them with a smile on her face, sweat on her forehead. Nobody knows what Kenyan food looks like. This jollof is full of bay leaves and scotch bonnet so hot it burned my fingers to separate into pieces and dump into the blender the night before in the suffocating warmth of the kitchen. Today my sister and I eat platefuls like dutiful daughters, the insides of our mouths stinging, cumin seeds caught on our tongues. We watch our classmates spear dodo with their forks and nod when they tell us that they like these bananas (because even then we know that no one else eats plantain). Next to the red station, China, I stare out across the cafeteria, where my mother smiles at me from Kenya and wipes her face with the back of her wrist, where I ask myself what color I feel for the homeland, and then I’m not sure that I’ve ever had an answer.



When I see the homeland in color it is ankara glittering from the inside of a red and blue bag, it is the hand cream my mommy-auntie left on the shelf when she went back to the homeland, peach, rosewater. The grimy glass bottles of Fanta in the back of the African market, in a fridge hidden behind shelves of Nido and cornflakes and halal kilishi and black soap. The dust everybody talked about, settling over their feet like beauty powder. I tell myself know dust, sparkling in the air when light comes through and beams across the living room carpet. I know snow, sparkling in the air when light hits it from all sides. I know the grime I swept up from windowsills with one finger, I don’t know anything about the dust. But the smell of it. And how it gets into your mouth. And the red.



My mother hasn’t spoken about the dust since my father came back from the airport one night, auburn lining his luggage. My father has never spoken about the dust. Instead he told us about the color television in his baba’s bedroom which he and his siblings would secretly watch as children, he described the amount of beer his parents bought him for his high school graduation party before he left for America. The day my father started to remember the homeland more than he had ever remembered it before was the day he began to forget us. Twenty-five years and the Texas in his accent made no difference, when he left sometimes none of us knew if, this time, he would ever be back. Once when my father came back he brought us a suitcase full of toilet paper we were not allowed to touch. Too many curses in the homeland, my mother told us. Too much conflict for this house. I saw the nostalgia dry up inside of her, grow inside of me, and then the homeland became so many colors I couldn’t name them all at once. When I looked at a map of the continent I saw a darkness full of purple lights, bouncing; a house bursting with cousins, spilling out aunties and uncles and music and noise; oil-stained linoleum, reeking of meat roasted to oblivion; green Heineken bottles and the caps we collected and held up to our noses, that bitter lemony smell of the metal; praise medleys and Nollywood voices vibrating into our chests. The homeland became the color blue, a Super Blue Omo blue, of the blankets they piled on top of us during the blackout at mommy-auntie’s house in Ekpoma, and of the milk candy my uncles bought us at a kiosk in the middle of nowhere, and of the painted flowers bordering the china plates my grandmother stacked with biscuits and agege bread. I picked sugar crystals off the tops and ate garri with powdered milk and even though I knew the nostalgia had died within my mother, who was only here in Benin City to bury her iye, I would put my fingers to my mouth and taste sand. Sugar. But somehow from the window, from the playground in front of Mr. Bigg’s, in the hallways of the hospital where they brought my sister to take a shot of antimalarial, I could still hear the mourning. The sound of the shovel, dirt over an ancestor, someone disappeared into somewhere: someone finally returned to the sea. I wipe the tears off grown-up cheeks with my hands, my knuckles, and imagine ancestral spirits among the waves, bobbing like lights towards an unknown endlessness.



I hear the homeland like it’s trying to reach out through the speakers at a backyard wedding party and touch me, slip into my skin, nestle into my stomach. Somebody from the soil once said, “The place of remembrance.” Somebody newer said, “The center of love.” When, shaded in orange from a faraway streetlight, my cousins and I sit on an uncle’s front porch holding bottles of malta against our bottom lips and swaying reluctantly to P Square the summer of “1er Gaou”, I can maybe imagine that the stories are not so far away. That the language lives between my teeth, silently, tucked into the left sides of my cheek like baba dudu waiting to slip, to be swallowed whole. That when the time comes to speak, it filters out into the air like the red dust of the homeland. Its perfume. But our aunties say, “Sweet, like chalk,” and I do not know what on earth that means—*chalk? A sweetness?*—I think of a loss in translation, I think despair, I think of the sand, mixing in with the sugar. What I know how to translate is thank you. Good morning. I’ll see you later. I pronounced my name and all the aunties and uncles laughed at me. Then saddened for me. They said, “The name. What we gave to you from the homeland, the only thing we thought you could keep.”



When I speak homeland I speak something else. My parents call me baby-baby and sweetie pie, they kiss my forehead with lips pursed into an English *Honey I love you*, our language of intimacy. Their language of love. Even when they are very angry they are angry in English. I asked them, “How many times do you dream in homeland?” (But I cannot remember what on earth they had answered). When my parents speak homeland together it is their language of secrecy, and when my sister and I sit on the stairs trying to listen for our names in their dense conversations it almost feels like a constant defeat. Africa, a traitor. When I speak homeland it means I’m speaking English, which is not “my native language”, which cannot be; although it is the only thing I really speak, it is the language my mother used to sing to me at night as a baby, it is there when I love somebody, when I can’t find the words, when all I have between my teeth and inside of my stomach are shooting stars and feeling. I call my mother and ask her about her day, and the language comes out like gravel. She does not like the America in my accent, the softness of the syllables, the mismatched tones; she says, in English, “Just speak English. ”



I think that maybe she found English a liberation. She cannot speak homeland without bringing it to life with English. She was younger than I am when she arrived at LaGuardia, Jheri-curled hair and a suitcase full of Austen and Shakespeare, she could not tell you who the current president of Nigeria is—and so we can almost forget that there’s something missing. We throw *I love you*s out into the world like confetti. There is no word for love in homeland. Still I kept notebooks full of words, wahala and mumu and na wa o, and when I wanted to learn something beyond the heartbeat of the nation she said, “No, you are from the *heartbeat of the nation**.*” When I tried to learn homeland she said, “Stop, stop speaking.” I wrote down more words. She couldn’t understand them.



The homeland on paper is silent. Too small now. Too gone. I am obsessed with the ruins, I read all the stories about the kingdom and realize many of them end in a bloodshed that makes the baba dudu taste sour in my mouth. Yet relentlessly I search for art history papers about religious ceremonies and chalk thrown into rivers; I put together documents about spirituality and title them mysticism. I look at the shirts my sister and I were made to wear as children, photos of stolen artwork printed on the front and underneath, a caption urging the British to bring our iyoba home. Realize so much has been stolen that my foreign hands are never enough to salvage, no matter how bare, or determined. When I learn about the homeland my professor turns on the projector to flash us an image of the continent and then switches the slide to an overview of South Africa. One tribal system is Africa’s system. One people’s religion is African religion. We sit in lecture romanticizing Africa, they tell us, “Let’s think of a new Africa,” erase the old Africa—first the Kenya-yellow Africa, then the homeland of bouncing purple lights. “Let’s invest in Africa,” because Africa should be our next real-life endeavor, Africa has all this real-world potential, Africa just needs somebody to believe in it. They say everything I have is not my own, not my liberation love-language English, not my grandfather’s Catholic church, not my grandmother’s European name. They say everything I have is adulteration. My family does not care when I call after class to describe all the Wole Soyinka I have studied. All they know about the history of the homeland is that it was a very large and very ancient kingdom, and for this reason my sister and I were named very ancient things. The first woman born to the world was Adesuwa. The second, our namesake. My mind dreams her up in a deep red wrapper, shining, coral beads clinking together around her neck and ankles. Black hair gathered into a crown. My mind dreams up a woman from the homeland and I do not think she looks like me. My aunties, wrapping fufu in aluminum foil, sometimes stare as one of us passes through the doorway, lamenting our faces (features full of America). How much America has drawn homeland out of their children. How they cannot give us a single piece of our ancestors, no matter how hard they try. But instead bequeathed a nostalgia so heavy it is all of the old country weighing us down. We say we would like to someday visit the homeland; they ask us what we think we are trying to find.



They do not know that when we are not learning about the homeland, the homeland does not exist. There are no black children in America whose parents got off planes here in 1984 or 1991. The grandmothers I venerate were Freedom Riders, were women who lit the lamps along the underground railroad, grandmothers who did not know I would come but did all these things so that I could come. Their blackness is the only blackness that holds me in its arms and makes me feel like a daughter. The homeland is a birthplace I romanticize through their eyes. When I learn about black people for the first time I remember my teacher in that empty classroom, sunlight filtering through the window and illuminating the colors on each shiny page of the book, Ruby Bridges lit up like royalty. My teacher followed my eyes, wanting me to read the words and breathe in the story, the courage! The revolutionary! But I kept looking down at the illustration of her, Ruby Bridges in a pink dress, six years old and brown like me, I wanted her curls and her white socks and her cardigan. Wanted the baubles tying up her hair. At home I have big flat picture books about Sojourner Truth and John Henry but my grandmother is a woman I speak to once every seven years. My grandmothers are all dead. The last time the homeland buried an iye I was not four years old eating garri out of a ceramic bowl, sitting on the window seat and trying to hear the bright music of church bells piercing through the gray gray sky. The last time, I was facing my house, in the middle of the road, another place I’d started calling home. That last time, I cried. A loss so vast it was all of those souls, lights drifting through the ocean, tired of waiting for me to find them.



When I dream of the homeland I dream mythology. Everything I have is not my own. How many times have I learned about the homeland and hoped I could feel some kind of connection or some kind of beauty in a history no one records anymore? Do I still press my palms against the glass at the Met and close my eyes in front of the ivories, wishing some kind of forebear magic would filter in and fuse with my very Western soul? I had a mommy-auntie who would carry me on her back until I fell asleep on her shoulder and feed me beans with the tips of her fingers, who would press her cheek against my forehead when I was sick and sweating in her arms and once walked a mile in the snow to buy medicine for my fever.



“What’s the matter?” my mother would ask me when I was very little, and my mommy-auntie would explain, “She doesn’t like crowds.” Or, “The TV’s too loud.” Or, “She only drinks chocolate Nesquik, you’ve bought her strawberry.”



Sometimes we’d go out to feed bread to the birds after it rained, and then she would poke my stomach and ask me questions in homeland. (Sometimes I answered correctly and when this happened she would take both my hands and shake them, overjoyed). When she went back everyone says I sat by the front door and cried for weeks. When I speak to her on the phone now she cannot understand me. Eventually someone explains that mommy-auntie isn’t used to my accent anymore, the American noise of my words so thick and heavy that she never calls to speak to me again. But there was a time I dreamed of her when I dreamed of the homeland, I conjured her smell when other people’s planes landed in from West Africa at JFK, I slept with her scarf around my neck and listened to people talk to her on the phone and wished she would ask to speak to me again. So that maybe I could just try again.



When I learn about the homeland I draw a map in my head that looks like an expanse of silk-linked constellations. Trails of lights intersecting across the sea, a warm clear water and something returned. A map that sounds like highlife guitar, collecting dollar bills on a shoe-scuffed dance floor, Asa above the sizzling of onions, like cymbals edited into her rustic strumming as my friend’s mother cooks a golden shito behind us. A map that has all the wrinkles of fabric crumpled up at the back of my clothes drawer, glitter from the gele still rigid with pins, sequins from the skirt our grandmother sent us from a tailor in Ibadan. Iye-nokhua, drinking her morning milk and tea and eating her buttered bread at the table, then an apparition of woman towering over me while I squinted at the crystals on the biscuits, the flowers on the plates. Later an illumination of a buoy shifting towards the final star, the homeland, the center of the world. The two-piece she sent was green-black-orange, and when I tried to put it on I realized I couldn’t sit, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe in it. Instead put it to my nose and inhaled deep the Africa. Was this, I wondered, a thing I felt I knew by heart? (“No,” my parents would later say. “No, you don’t know Nigeria.”)



Still, how it smelled like my father when he comes back from the homeland, sad to return to remembering us again, jetlagged and sentimental for days—how it felt like falling asleep as a five-year old with my pinkies stuck in the lace of his white-lavender agbada. The time he would look at me like he was looking at *me*, instead of something stopping him from making that final trip back home. One day when my sister and I were small he told us that there is truly not much homeland in us but just look through the window—we were in the car, I rolled down the glass and put my hand out towards the traffic—just look through the window, this place should be home. So maybe every day I do the remembering. And maybe every time we’re a little more found.



 

*2013*



 



I don’t know when the AIDS crisis happens. In the sixties? Seventies?



The eighties. My AP U.S. History teacher calls the virus “hiv”, like it doesn’t stand for something else, like it’s supposed to be funny. When we watch *Forrest Gump *in class,he says that’s what Jenny probably died from. Nobody understands how. A contaminated needle? Sex work?



“All right, calm down,” he tells us. “It was hiv that killed her, definitely. You all have heard of it. Okay. Anyway. Now, Reaganomics.”



I’ve never heard of Reaganomics before, nor do I care much for Ronald Reagan, but I do know about HIV. Or, at least, I know about AIDS. My babysitter, a twenty-five year old from Mali, had told my sister and me about it when we were children.



“You have to take medication forever,” she said. “No cure at all.”



“How do you get it?”



“You have to touch body fluid.”



“So what if you want to kiss your baby?”



“You can’t.”



I am 15 years old clicking a pen in the back of the classroom, thinking about the babysitter and her miseducation. Mine, too: I take Health on Tuesday and Thursday mornings but sex ed consists of researching the statistics of condom failure and taking quizzes on the effects of latex versus those of polyurethane. I am 15 and have never touched a condom even in its wrapper, don’t know what one looks like in real life or how to put one on a banana. That it prevents HIV infection I know from watching *Grey’s Anatomy *and *Degrassi*, the same way I pieced together sex years after my classmates had already started doing it.



My pediatrician never asks me if I’m sexually active. He’s from Ghana and has known me since I was a baby. When he retires in May and I have to go to an out-of-town medical center to do my physical, the doctor ends up being a Nigerian who goes to my church. She also does not bother asking me if I’m sexually active, but there are papers taped to the wall reminding girls over the age of fourteen to get tested for HIV.



She sees me staring. “It’s important,” she says. “For girls in this area.” It doesn’t occur to me to even ask about the boys.



 



*2016*



 



For Africa I could see the realism. Photos of rail-thin women, their robes falling down, and their children starving, flies swarming their mouths.



My mother never talked to us about AIDS in Nigeria. By the time I could understand the connections people made between Africans and disease, I was old enough to brush off the jokes as First World ignorance. It didn’t matter, anyway—she didn’t tell us much about her country in general. My sister and I only knew about the dust, from visiting in 2001, and the bombings because of the newspapers, and then the rice at parties.



My mother, though, has actually lived in the United States longer than she has lived in Nigeria. She came here in 1986, a nineteen-year old graduate student living with her brother and his family in Brooklyn. The first cases of AIDS in the U.S. had been published in newspapers five years earlier. When I asked her what she thought about the epidemic at the time, she texted back:



 



**I was not Scare because I knew what to do .. I knew Aids is spread in certain way and people need to use Condom I was not having unprotect ed sex nor was i using contaminated needles.**



 



I responded:



 



**it wasn’t a scary thing, all those people dying? even if you weren’t affected?**



 



She called me then. “It’s not that I didn’t care,” she said. “It’s just that I wasn’t scared, because I knew.”



College in Nigeria had taught her well: safe sex workshops and doctors coming to speak about how AIDS *really *kills, more than malaria or polio.



“How did they teach you?”



“Workshops.”



“What kind of workshops?”



“Just workshops.” She pauses. “Why do you like this class so much, anyway?”



She’s referring to the one class I’m required to take as a freshman at Harvard, Expository Writing. I’d told her I put HIV/AIDS in Culture as my first choice.



“You shouldn’t have it as a first choice,” she continues. “Those times are done, it won’t help you to learn about it. AIDS? Why would you want to learn about that?”



I’m not very sure how to answer that question. I have read *Three Junes*, *How I Loved You, Just Between Us, *and *The Hours*—all novels with HIV-positive gay men as central characters. I’ve read *Two Boys Kissing *and felt my eyes widen with horror at the author’s description of death, constant death, before this new wave of LGBTQ liberation. AIDS, for me, is associated with terrible loss. For my mother, though, AIDS is not about homosexuality at all. It’s about the stigmatization of her homeland, racial slurs against her people, Africa becoming an embodiment of contamination. In America, she only saw the illness on the news and heard about protests on the radio, but she did not know the extent to which AIDS was ravaging the cities. I think of her sitting on the subway in her long skirts and sweaters, Jeri-curled hair, staring, perplexed, at an ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) poster wheat-pasted on the other side of the train.



My father might also have seen these posters, but on the Capital Metro in Austin where he was an undergrad at the University of Texas. When I call to ask him what he thought about AIDS in the eighties, he says, “Oh, it was very, very scary. We didn’t really know what was going on. Nobody know what was going on, people sick, dying, left to right…there was so much people, nobody I knew but still…nobody knew what was AIDS...”



It’s an answer I hadn’t expected. My mother is typically more aware of her surroundings, and of current events, than he is. But she had come from the village and America was paradise. My father, in contrast, came from a very wealthy family in Nigeria, and consequently poverty was not a characteristic he was trying to shake off; he came to study in the U.S. only because he failed his WAEC, West Africa’s version of the SAT. His confusion throughout the years of the epidemic, as he goes on to explain to me, stemmed from everyone else’s confusion. People said you could get it from touching hands. People said that was impossible, you could only get it from sex. People said heterosexuals didn’t have to worry about contracting anything.



“You see,” he tells me. “Very crazy. Very scary.”



“What was the government doing? Reagan, or whoever.”



“Eh. A lot of stuff, I think. The disease was just very bad.”



But on Reagan’s Wikipedia page, his response to the AIDS epidemic consists of two thin paragraphs detailing how the administration mostly ignored the crisis. Even the War on Drugs and a list of his filmography both have lengthy descriptions (and links to their own separate articles), and there is nothing about AIDS in regards to his legacy. Instead, Wikipedia describes his restoration of the American morale and a renewal of the American Dream.



“Why are you asking?” my father wants to know, and so I answer him the way I answered my mother: “Because I don’t have much knowledge about that time in history.”



He makes no comment about it. My mother had repeated, “But how is *that* going to help *you*?”



 



*2014*



 



There is a new drug called Truvada that prevents HIV infection. I learn about it at an AIDS Walk in July, an end-of-the-year activity planned by my STEP program.



At this point, I have a love-hate relationship with the STEP program. On one hand, I like it better than school because of all the friends I’ve made there. On the other, I’d undeclared myself pre-med in February, and attending the Saturday classes remind me of the nightmare that was tenth grade chemistry.



Despite the program’s deep emphasis on medicine, we receive no information about HIV and AIDS before assembling on 168th Street to board the train together. The event is sent to the email list, highlighted mandatory, and that’s that. We are expected to show up robust and attentive.



It’s the twenty-eighth annual AIDS Walk NY, hosted by the GMHC. Nobody has any idea what GMHC stands for. My friend Jude suggests that it is a medical insurance company, perhaps, or some kind of fundraising organization like the American Cancer Society. There are stands named after people who’ve died from AIDS, testing stations, merchandise being given out. Tearful black women thanking us for our support. We are too confused to understand why. Even more confused when the STEP administrator asks us to hold up signs with the program’s name on them.



“We’re representing the university,” he says, but it just seems so strange to me, so callous, when everyone else is carrying signs with the names of the dead.



DeBlasio speaks about the cost of the pills for high risk populations and I raise up my arms to take snapchats of him, a tiny glowing figure at the podium under the American flag. Smells of body, as we are all so close together, sounds of crying as DeBlasio addresses the audience. People start the walk in tears. We, a blue-shirted, poster-wielding group of high school students, complain about the humidity along the checkpoints, stopping at random to pose for group photos.



I don’t even make it out until the end. It gets too hot, I’m tired, and once I can see the streets over Central Park’s hills, I duck under the security tape and dash into a convenience store for air conditioning.



*Why is AIDS such a big thing in New York City anyway? *I wonder, fanning myself against the wall, wiping the sweat off my phone screen to scroll through my Legião Urbana albums. *Nobody dies from it in America anymore.*



My birthday’s passed but I have not yet read *Three Junes, *and so I don’t know about Malachy Burns dying alone in his Greenwich Village apartment. I know, however, that the lead singer of Legião Urbana, Renato Russo, died of complications due to AIDS in 1996. But I have seen him too many times on YouTube, strolling across the stage, sinking to his knees and wailing into the microphone. The greatest artist of all time could not have died horrifically.



I picture Jenny from* Forrest Gump*, dressed in white with flowers in her hair, peacefully going in her sleep—*that’s how it must have been,* I think, *for lots of people*.



 



*2016*



 



I’ve cried a lot this semester because of Expository Writing. I finish watching *The Normal Heart *at 2 a.m. and sit there on my bed in the dark, sobbing. One of the documentaries we’re asked to watch, *How to Survive a Plague, *almost brings me to tears in the common room. In the car over spring break, I read *Angels in America, *one of our required texts, and my mother asks me if I’m developing a cold, from the sound of my sniffling.



“No,” I say. “It’s this book.”



“What about the book?”



“Just. The book.”



Actually, the readings. And the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” posters. And the pictures of emaciated bodies tied up in garbage bags, turned away from funeral homes: one of the nation’s greatest manifestations of indifference. How disturbing that it was a relief at that time, when my AP U.S. History teacher skipped over the unit, to not have to take another test on something else.



We don’t take exams in Expos, but we don’t skip over anything related to the epidemic either. We analyze ACT UP t-shirt designs and learn that if we were to be transported back into the nineties, most students on campus would have been wearing them, and we would have had SILENCE=DEATH buttons on our backpacks.



*Would I have had a button on my backpack?*



I look to my bare laptop, no stickers that identify me as a supporter of anything significant. The only rally I’ve ever attended was that AIDS Walk in 2014, and as a child, had accompanied my mother to a March for Life. There were other demonstrations, ones sponsored by Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, but they were in New York City and my suburban lifestyle encouraged laziness: the Long Island Rail Road was expensive, I could never figure out how to navigate the subway trains, and moreover, I was deathly afraid of getting arrested for protesting.



I am not, however, afraid of reading about AIDS. Or talking about it. In fact, I call my mother all the time to tell her about the literature we read and the films I’ve watched. Every time I say, “So in my HIV/AIDS class…” I can feel her discomfort on the other end of the line. *Which is totally okay*, I want to tell her. For a lot of people, it’s an uncomfortable topic.



She doesn’t ask me why I care about the class anymore, she just listens to me. And that is the most gratifying part.

 



What I remember most about Lydia—her skin. Golden-brown, a few shades darker than my mother’s pale yellow, her fingers on the piano keys, legs tucked back beneath the cushioned bench. The way she smelled, like hair salon, like black soap and makeup, semi-sweet and comfortingly Nigerian. Her face was so soft. I reached up, often, to touch it; she would bend down, sending a warm gust of hair-salon-soap-sweet scent into my eyes, and let me pinch her cheeks. I was eight years old and ever-skeptical of her adulthood, marveled aloud at her youth: “You’re such a baby, Lydia, so cute,” was my daily announcement. “You’re so young and adorable.”



Lydia was eleven years older but she put up with me, let me sit on her lap and bat her shiny brown braids, sang Black-Eyed Peas (“Do ‘Where is the Love,’ ” my sister and I demanded, every time), and read us stories. Over the long summer during which she babysat us we took many naps, most of them preceded by either a game or a story. Wedged between my sister and me in my twin bed, she told us about little village girls and forests and tigers and mangoes, her arms in the air like an artist, illustrating scenes with her hands. When she fell asleep she snored. Wide awake beside her, I’d listen for her deep breathing and then sit up in bed, leaf through books on the shelves, look down at her sleeping face and wonder if this is what my mother looked like coming to America at nineteen years old--soft-skinned and babyfaced as Lydia.



***



She had only been here for about a year, moving into the yellow house down the block with her two older sisters, Christiane and Vivie, Christiane’s husband Emil, and their little sons Raphael and Samuel. We saw them come in with their U-Haul in June, watched them from our driveway where we sat barefoot on the hood of my parents’ minivan. My sister and I had never met anyone from Cameroon before.



“They make the best rice,” we concluded, standing in their kitchen, barefoot on the oil-stained linoleum, watching the pot rattle on the stove. “Onions underneath, all the time.”



While my sister studied the art of rice-making, eagerly tiptoeing alongside Lydia or Christiane or occasionally Vivie, I played with baby Samuel on the floor and entertained three-year old Raphael. During the summer, the Biya house was alive as a marketplace, Emil stomping through the back door with his absentminded hellos and how-is-your-fathers; Christiane sucking her teeth, her eyes swallowed by her tiny wire-rimmed glasses; Vivie breezing in and out of the house; the kids screaming above Kaïssa and Henri Dikonguéhumming brightlyout of the kitchen CD player; and Lydia, watching Oprah on the sofa, or Lydia at the piano, singing.



“We used to perform as a group,” Christiane told us, showing us photos. “All over, we sang. For the church, especially.”



They had a famed mother, this grand matriarchal figure who ran a church and had once managed her daughters’ childhood music careers. They had made a gospel CD. When the three of them sang together one night, crowded around the piano, my mother got up and said she had tears in her eyes.



My mother loved the three of them almost as much as my sister and I did. Peeling plantain on her little stool in our kitchen, she could not stop talking about Christiane and Lydia and Vivie, invited them over eagerly for moin-moin and akamu and Ovaltine on Sundays, watched Nollywood movies with them in our living room. Quickly she and my father became good friends with the Biyas, taking on the roles of auntie and uncle for Christiane and Emil. The adults hung out in the living room frequently that summer while I looked after baby Samuel and my sister actively eavesdropped. She told me, “They talk a lot about green cards.”



We didn’t know what those were, but they could talk about them for hours, Christiane, Lydia, Vivie, Emil, and my parents, sitting there clamoring about visas and green cards past nightfall.



“What can they do, my brother? They can’t do nothing, nothing o,” my father insisted, aggressively, and my mother would say to them in high pitched emphasis, “Abeg, no worry o, God is in control.”



Then Christiane would suck her teeth and touch her forehead. “Lord have mercy, I don’t know.”



The summer ended on one of those nights. My sister and I returned to school the next morning, Lydia and Vivie to the local college. We would meet Lydia standing on the front porch of our house once we got off the bus, tiny in her long skirt and oversized sweater, red-eyed and fidgety. She supervised our homework quietly and declined our requests to play Monkey-in-the-Middle and TAPS outside. Instead, she leaned over the sink, watched us mess around in the backyard until it got late and there was rice on the table. In the evenings she lay on the couch drowsily, blinking slowly, allowing me to read to her if only I wasn’t too loud: the voyages of Sinbad, Ramona, Boxcar Children, Lemony Snicket.



“Sing? Please?” I’d murmur, bouncing onto her lap in our living room, raising my hands to pinch her cheeks.



She was listless, cold-palmed, yet she complied. “Sit next to me,” she said, patting the cushion. But slowly her voice would grow startlingly shaky, and then all of a sudden she would stop. Sigh. Stroke the edges of my hair.



She wore winter coats in September, grew purple under the eyes, wouldn’t eat. We began going straight to Lydia’s house instead of ours, where she was perpetually absent; Christiane said, “Lydia’s sick.”



Vivie was sick too. Vivie was sick first. One time I saw her come down the stairs from where I was playing on the floor with Samuel, painfully skinny, smiling only when she saw me: “Have you eaten yet?”



There was rice, cold on the stove, and my sister and I ate it with red stew and bananas and did not know what to make of Vivie, speaking hysterical French in the living room, disappearing back up to the bedrooms for the rest of the week. We missed Lydia badly. My mother said, “Lydia is sick, remember? They had to bring her to the hospital.”



One day after school they took us to her—it was a white, white hospital, everything pristine and shining. I was, initially, ridiculously excited, first to see my mother (in the daytime! on a weekday!) and second, to visit Lydia. I remember getting lost among the lack of color, looking for her in vibrant yellow and green, walking around for what seemed like hours and feeling unbelievably tired.



“It’s this room,” Christiane announced finally, pointing down the hallway.



Somehow the door opened. In my Mary Janes and school uniform, moving in front of my sister, I thought, hesitantly, Lydia is not herself.



There were wires. There was maybe a tube. She was puffy, her face, her exposed arms. I wanted to climb onto the bed but I was afraid. She was excited to see us, raised her hands weakly for us; we skirted solemnly over to the bed, clinging to her sheets.



“I am coming home soon,” she whispered, pulling us in, as if we were about to take another summer nap. “Don’t worry about me, I am coming home soon.”



Then she started to cry, and my mother swooped in with her hands, flat as paddles, shooing us up and out of the room.



***



Lydia returned the next week, her face and arms and legs swollen from all the medication she had to take in order to be well. She walked slowly and erratically around the Biya house, shaking, feeding us potato bread and beans, watching Oprah on the couch with us and shaking. Every motion was slurred, like the world was a daze. She could not stop moving her hands. Most of the time she could not speak, her mouth couldn’t form any words, she stuttered even trying to laugh, and when she tried to laugh she would begin to cry, and then Christiane would appear to take her upstairs.



In the beginning I kept asking questions: what’s wrong with Lydia? why does she look like that? how does medication make you look like that? what’s wrong with Vivie? what kind of sickness do they have?



My mother was vague. “She’s just sick with something,” she’d respond, as if she herself didn’t know, and eventually I just stopped asking.



Of course, I did not ask Lydia anything, not even if she was feeling better, because clearly she was still very unwell and I thought it was best to leave her alone. My sister and I spent sullen, somber nights on the Biyas’ sofa, cartoons flickering blue into our faces. The adults crowded in the living room again, this time quietly, carrying out tense conversations I couldn’t understand, or tried not to hear. There was Lydia on an armchair, wrapped in a quilt, trembling violently from the medication, slurring; Vivie with her eyes gigantic, rimmed with black, bruise-like shadows, collarbones jutting out of her skin; Christiane, arms crossed, sucking her teeth, snapping; Emil in his exhausted silence; and my parents, the elders, the know-it-alls, the halfway-Americans, facing Christiane on the couch. One night the famed mother was called up and put on speakerphone, her voice so loud the whole neighborhood must have heard her declare, “Just wait, my daughters—I will be there!”



My mother cooked the day she arrived, egusi and fufu and jollof rice, and cut up watermelon and pawpaw and pineapple. There was an elaborate dinner set up in our dining room, the famed mother designated to the head of the table opposite my father, a spot usually reserved for an uncle. My sister and I brought out the bowls of water and towels and waited nervously for her to finish washing her hands. We were not sure what to call her because auntie felt more appropriate but she looked like an old grandmama with her big headwrap and shimmering ankara, blue and orange. She didn’t seem to care what we called her; “You’re so well-behaved,” she told us, “so well-mannered, so pretty.”



My mother was overjoyed by the compliments. Made us play piano for her and sing.



There are very few substantial memories I have of the Biyas beyond this. All of a sudden it was June and I was sweating in my uniform, bouncing off the schoolbus for the start of summer vacation. My mother sent my sister and me to day camp and when I was not a member of the nine- to ten-year old Junior Wolves program, trading lanyards and playing Nok Hockey till I couldn’t feel my knuckles, I was in my parents’ bedroom watching Avatar on Nickelodeon, reeking of chlorine.



“Don’t worry,” my mother said often then, out of random, “everything will be okay with Lydia.”



My sister and I were aware of the fact that my parents visited the Biyas without us and invited them over when we had gone to sleep. But I could hear my mother talking to my father about them early in the morning, when I woke up to watch Ben 10 at six thirty before summer camp. And when we came downstairs to eat cereal at eight, the chairs in the living room always smelled of them; the famed mother more than anyone else.



So, of course, then we knew that she was leaving.



***



The famed mother decided to take her daughters away in the middle of a storm. I was out on my front lawn, pulling flowers in the rain out of boredom, shivering in a t-shirt and shorts. It was a dark evening. The street lamps glowed orange onto the wet streets and sidewalks, highlighting my mother in the haze of fog and gloom, a huge looming shadow approaching the house. She was wearing a black rain jacket. From the mudroom, through the window screen, my sister hissed, “Get inside.”



And then in the car my father drove us all to Lydia’s house, which is the last time I played with Samuel, which is the time I tried to teach him to walk, and distracted by Lydia’s crying, let him go, which is when he fell down and lost a tooth, blood on the wood, nobody turning around fast enough for his screams—Christiane picking him up off the floor as slowly as if she were in a dream. The last time I saw the famed mother in her headwrap, green and blue, sitting at the front of the room like majesty, Lydia in her blanket unable to sit still, Vivie crying and laughing…



At nine there was nothing I knew about deportation, but I heard the famed mother tell us, “We will go back to Cameroon, all of us, before this nonsense begins,” and I didn’t know this had anything to do with green cards, or visas, or fear.



“Lydia and Vivie,” my mother said, years later, “They were so scared. Sometimes when you get so scared it can make your mind sick…”



What I remember least about Lydia—her hands, wiping away our tears. Whatever she said, stammering, to comfort us, what she did, how she looked. The final few minutes.



Saying goodbye.



 

You are new to Georgetown when you arrive the first week of June. All you see are rainbows—flags of them, banners, geotags, advertisements, merchandise. Restaurants and clothing stores covered in streamers fluttering heavily in the thick humid air. It’s kind of South, you think, but Georgetown is so beautiful. Your mother had said, “Don’t walk alone here, people will wonder what you’re doing in this place.” She has already trained you to make a habit out of being very good. She thought it would protect your body from all the people who wanted to break it. But here in Georgetown, flags waving, colors streaming, you explore sidewalks in the daytime, awe-filled and fearless.



The museum you work at is only a few minutes away from your apartment. All the walking reminds you of Cambridge, blessed Cambridge, your real home; all the walking makes you feel good, like you can breathe again after the monotony of sleeping, eating, and staying awake. Long Island’s suburbs are wooded, bleak, and empty. When you step outside there is silence. When you sit inside you turn on the TV and leave it going for hours, even when you’ve gone downstairs, even when you’ve gone to bed. Only nature, disordered, suffocating the skies, motivates you to sometimes bask in the quiet.



The museum is surrounded by gardens. Google Maps doesn’t recognize any of them so they are unnavigable on the first and second tries. Your boss gives you a tour one evening after work, pointing at fountains and identifying trees as you lag behind, swatting at mosquitoes. He says, “The founder modeled this one after Eastern spirituality, all the rage at the time,” and you remember all the teenage Buddhists you fell in love with in high school. When he starts moving again you pause in the center, sigh inwardly and swear that someday you will marry someone interested in landscaping these kinds of things in white-fenced backyards. On your way home in the afternoons you see millennials jogging, parents walking children back from school. Whenever you pass people pushing baby strollers you conjure up a family here in D.C., with all its rainbow madness, and picture your rearranged future.



The citizens around are almost always neighbors, because the apartment building is about ten minutes away from 32nd Street. You love the apartment, its coziness, the biggest bed you’ve ever slept in alone. You like the ease but also the independence, and the proximity of the streets. They can be yours—as you take photos of decorations on shop windows, tripping over tourists and beggars and large groups of people—*this can be your city.*



But your streets black out beneath you in the nighttime, heading back to the apartment alone or on a muggy morning through an isolated walkway. Here in Georgetown proper, *Blue Neighbourhood *on repeat in your ears, the streets tell you to be scared of ghosts: men lurking on sidewalks darkened by trees, hiding behind bushes, smoking on their front steps. The streets tell you not to scare the woman walking her dog at nine p.m., because you are black in this background, so black and so frightening, all 5’5 of you wheezing uphill in Old Navy shorts and a three-dollar tank top. The revelations come in pieces, visions on your way to work in the morning: there are no black hands unlocking these doors, no black children skipping past the gardens, no black women taking their toddlers into the Dumbarton Park. On a daytrip to Howard the campus shows off its mecca of dark-skinned, thick-limbed girls and you want to sigh with all of them, bring them back to Georgetown, condemn the R street suffering together.



Thewaterfront is where you feel okay staring shamelessly in a way you have not since childhood. It is a boring place, full of wooden bridges and ducks in waves and festive people drinking coolers on speedboats. You lean longingly over the edge of the deck, imagining the kissing, drunken motions, *Oh Wonder* and *The 1975* floating softly above the Potomac. Someday when you are rich enough to live in Georgetown you will take your family to eat seafood here and your children will play in the fountains. Someday the streets will not run so old under your feet, and the heat will feel like home, and your partner will fold their fingers into yours on the way, the softness of their smooth palm colliding with your aged, weather-beaten life lines. You will make space for them on the sidewalk, as you make space for all the upper class people of Georgetown with nothing to do in the heavy heat of summer. You will make yourself smaller so that you do not frighten the women by accidentally brushing against their shoulders, or stumbling beside them, or turning their way. Close your eyes and face another direction.



Mother’s sights are set on the boroughs. She calls from the Bronx and it’s almost like 9/11 in real time, a natural disaster you can actually remember, when she says, “Hillary Clinton paves the way for you.” You get goosebumps washing lettuce in the kitchen. Over the sink you tear up for your fourteen-year old self who somehow found meaning in the state of New York and slowly, desperately, wanted to be President.



“But will they like you?” somebody had asked you, and still today you’re not sure what that means.



The wonderful people working with you are well-liked and they are all from other states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas. They don’t care about Long Island. They coax you in front of laptops and squish together with you on tiny couches and lead you on the rocky trail towards the beautiful parts of the gardens. Your foreignness isn’t hefty all the time. The sun goes down but 30th rustles life, sound of cars about to crash, and your hands, cupping aimlessly at fireflies on the window screen, bleeding all the world’s ambitions down against the waving branches.



Here slammed into fact [you are too new here] and history [they say you built Washington underground], you visit museums with the wonderful people and everything you know and love becomes invisible. You become invisible when you can’t find your stories in captions, when your face is rubbed out of black and white photographs. At the museum you fall centuries behind, nauseated by the sight of the original American flag and the thought of taking your children to see it. Over the weekend one person murders forty-nine people and your mother on the phone says, “Nobody ever *really* accepts the deviants.” You are tolerated by Abraham Lincoln on his throne, casting shadows on the lawn, and by the soldiers who keep giving themselves; you trace plaques and think, *For what? *any time the cameras flash. You are tolerated by the people of Georgetown, glancing up for proof of your existence with their bare eyes, afraid to touch with their bare hands. A homeless black man shouts, “Hey gorgeous, hey gorgeous,” and you remember standing in front of the mirror in the museum bathroom, witness to your own emasculation, hating the flimsy nature of bodies. M Street sneaks through you. M Street calls you Little Girl and Woman all at the same time. M Street violates you. Swallows your spouse whole in its cobblestones.



In the gardens, dry-eyed among the gods and the angels, you get tired so fast worrying about being broke and unloved. There are fancy grownups drinking wine out of plastic cups, elegant ladies sitting on the grass against their husbands, bees swarming the flowers behind them. Evening sets. You go back to good friends, food in the apartment, love on the opposite side of the coast. Mother calls, says, “Find a Catholic church.” She wouldn’t understand why you take photos of political posters on Sunday mornings, tiptoeing alongside the highway underneath the pride flags fluttering over the Hilton hotel. June is coming to an end and you are waiting for everyone to shatter; you snap a picture of hydrangeas tumbling over a gate top and learn that this house costs six million dollars. *Will I, *you wonder, *at this moment, get arrested for Possession of Otherworldly Image?*



At the station a black woman is crying, weave in a bandana, makeup smearing. Rare on this block, new in this city, which is old as the world. You do not want to be her but you do not know what to think of your hair, hidden beneath smoldering twists, or your naked cheeks and forehead, charcoaling by the minute. She can’t see your eyes through your very tinted glasses. Instead of watching her you swivel to stare up at a statue of Gandhi: “I’ve been to India,” you’d joked. “Where’s the geotag for the Embassy?”



But again, within the Circle, you shove in your earphones, blast *The Life of Pablo, *and remember the museum fences glinting under the sunlight. The wonderful people like listening to pop. The wonderful people sit beside you in an Uber as you discuss Chance the Rapper with the black driver who talks too much. He brings up gentrification, as the two of you exist only incidentally in this country, reminded to make space for other people—rich lives, blue lives, all lives. He mentions Freddie Gray, as your bodies are so prone to breakage.



“Yes,” you respond. A fact of life, this unfortunate condition.



Another fact: the death.



When Alton Sterling is killed and you can’t bear to look at the monuments any longer, bleeding for “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW,” bleeding for your unborn sons and daughters who will be black because of you, Georgetown keeps on shining in the morning. Black nannies fixing pigtails on the sidewalk. Black security guards staring at you when you walk into stores. Black women huddled in corners, distraught like the crying woman in DuPont Circle, begging bare-backed on the street. Your masculinity is a kind that still leaves you enchained and so you no longer know how to cry when you need to. The tears fail to come a thousand times, reading Huffington Post at work, taking snap chats of the Library of Congress. They shoot Philando Castile the next day. It is a Thursday. You worry that someday God will give you a son.



Once you step out onto 30th you are back in Georgetown and making everyone uncomfortable with your quiet grief. Illegal, even when you’re not on these streets. Painfully new, again.

My mother doesn’t believe in medicine. It doesn’t matter if it’s a prescription for antibiotics, some life-saving vaccination, or even the most basic level of psychotherapy.



“Why would you want someone digging into your private life?” she says, wrinkling her nose as my sister and I watch marathons of HBO’s *In Treatment*. In my head I replace the word* life *with *parts*. If you take your vitamins, you won’t need to go to those kinds of people.



“Magnesium, especially,” she reminds us in the morning, “to stay soft inside, and regular.”



I am. But I’m in pain.



“You know what, maybe you should go to a gynecologist,” my best friend Lili says. She tells me casually, like it’s something you do without thinking hard about it, like brushing your teeth. *You know, maybe you should just brush your teeth. Maybe drink some water.*



I hate drinking water. I may be dehydrated, and maybe that’s why it hurts.



“What are you doing?” she asks me.



“Nothing. Talking to you.”



Whenever I talk on the phone I start pacing figure eights around the kitchen, the dining table, my bedroom, and back to the living room. It doesn’t hurt now. Maybe I don’t exercise enough.



Lili sighs. “You’re a woman now. When you get your period, you need someone to make sure the hormones and shit are working right. It’s like growing a new organ. Has to get examined, like everything else.”



“Is it a man? I read a book where this girl went to a gynecologist and it was a man.”



“Books don’t tell you anything true, they just freak you out.”



She pauses. I hear chewing on the other line and try to visualize her: bed, green polka-dot comforter, pizza on a paper towel, and a laptop on her thighs. I’m always telling her to put a pillow underneath because you can kill your eggs that way, the free radicals burning into your ovaries. Lili doesn’t believe it.



She is new to this; she’s only had her period for three years. She got it when we were thirteen, in Maryland at her auntie Bintu’s house. She called me the next morning to tell me everything: the sheets in the middle of the night (stained), the pad her cousin had given her (Kotex brand), and her dad’s reaction (shock). My mom’s reaction was sorrow. I was in sixth grade and on my way to the dreaded weekly piano lesson when I felt the wetness in my new jeans and turned back towards the bathroom door. She cried. Then she tried not to cry and was happy for some days, left gifts on the table for me, bought me a cake. Sometimes she got angry and came up with all these reasons—I was lazy, I ate too much junk, I was failing math and spending too much time reading manga on the computer.



“Nobody gets it at this age,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”



So I was ashamed. And am ashamed, again, when I think about sitting on her bed in the dark, explaining the shooting pains, how she’ll shake her head at me as if I don’t know what really matters. In West Africa nobody has gynecologists or anything, and they live longer than we do here. Apart from the famine and disease and violence that kill people. If not for those things, Africans would live longer than all of us here, she says.



“It doesn’t matter whether the gynecologist a guy, honestly.” Lili doesn’t get it because she’s only half Senegalese, on her dad’s side, and he’s barely ever around. “They’re there to do a job and that’s it.”



Lili doesn’t have experience of her own, she just hears things. She got a pamphlet from the nurse’s office at school, did a check on her breasts, and found a bump. It’s shaped like a crescent moon and flat enough to pass as a birthmark. I think it’s a scab, like she got injured from a wire in her bra, but apparently it doesn’t work like that.



“You don’t know, you don’t even wear bras,” she says. “It could be something serious.”



She wants us both to go to the clinic, her with the spot on her boob, me with my restlessness. The conversation’s nearly done but we seem to have forgotten how to end the call. I do pirouettes in front of the refrigerator as we waste the next ten minutes trying to convince each other that everything’s fine, it’s not as bad as we think, we’re only sixteen and we eat vegetables at home and drink filtered water, not tap. I take vitamins.



“Have they been helping you?” Lili asks.



“With this?” I think hard even though I really don’t have to. “This, um, I don’t know.”



“Nena.”



“I don’t *think *so.”



“Nena,” she says irritably. “Just look up the place. Make an appointment.”



The website looks like it was designed in the nineties. Dr. Something-or-Other, an OB/GYN who graduated from a university I’ve never heard of. Female, thank God. I turn up the volume on the TV and change the channel to Cartoon Network, a lineup I no longer recognize. She takes insurance, but I don’t know where my cards are, don’t even know which company owns them. I hook my phone into the charger and stare at the TV screen. The bright colors make me feel safe. Surely if I sit here and watch this rainbow cartoon I’ll get better. If I just give it time, rest a little bit, forget about exams. It’s about stress.



My mother preaches stress. When she sees the president on the cover of *Time*, gray-haired and wrinkled. When one of us gets sick.



“It’s because you’re stressed,” she says. “It’s because you didn’t take your vitamins.”



There is a photo of the gynecologist on the upper right corner of the webpage. She’s got this seductive smile and long dark hair that hugs the curves of her face. *Come to my office. Come sit on my examining table.*



I have never been to the doctor without my parents. Lili hasn’t either, but she made up the plan: She’ll say we’re going to the mall, pick me up from the house in her dad’s Jeep, and drive us to the women’s health center at LIJ. She’s told her mom about the bump, but her mom is a stubborn person and believes it’s just a deflated pimple.



I don’t even know what I would tell the gynecologist—I realize I can’t identify all the regions of my body, don’t know what I mean when I wave towards the lower half of my stomach. We don’t believe in anatomy, either. When I was in fourth grade, *The Care and Keeping of You *appeared on the floor by magic; my mother had slipped it under the bedroom door with some of the pages stapled together. My sister and I took the staples out and hollered over the drawings of uteruses, covered our eyes at the watercolor vagina with its matching blue tampon. We just knew private parts, two words, imageless.



“Other people aren’t supposed to see this,” my mother would teach us in the bath, among all the warm water and duck-shaped washcloths and suds from Johnson’s baby soap. “Other people aren’t supposed to touch.”



And here I am making plans to bare my parts to Dr. Whomever, to a sterile room at the women’s clinic, to the entire world. I close the browser and take my hands off the keyboard, my eyes on the window scanning the empty driveway. *Before she comes home, I will be fine.*



I change the channel again, back to the Food Network. Lili sends me another message: *when do you wanna go?*



It hasn’t hurt since I got off the phone. I text her: *forget about it lol. tbh realized it was nothing.*



*Lol*, she texts.



*Lol*, I answer.



She starts typing something else, but I’m too embarrassed, and I move my phone to the far side of the couch so I don’t have to look at it anymore.



My mother’s car pulls up in front of the house, flashing its white and yellow lights through the windowpanes. I don’t have to tell her. It hasn’t hurt since the beginning of the day, I think. Maybe even since last night.



There’s no reason to tell anyone, or go anywhere at all. I watch Guy Fieri stuff his mouth full of pork loin and wait to hear the sound of the key turning into the lock.



 

We’ve climbed up on the roof before,



barefoot and shivering, at one time



there were no empty rooms, so many people in



the house, sounds of living and maybe



even singing. A voice that wasn’t ours.



We heard it then, under all those blazing stars



 



I mean pixels. Screen glows from within,



pulses in a waterfall, some kind of heartbeat



when we finally get up to close the door



when we do our homework after all these hours.



My mother calls, I want to be right where you are,



sleep, I love you, TV ruins your eyes.



 



It’s 11 pm and death is on my mind,



accidents upon accidents, blood and gore



somewhere in the streets, she



is the time passing and sick, invading dark



people gone missing—could she have been?



No, says my sister, but she’s young and has no power



 



over things we can’t trust and things we can’t see.



I’m young and have no power, am small, never win



but I check the empty driveway, look up at the sky line



inside, it’s my sister; outside, the lights and cars,



and all I want are her footsteps upstairs, the shower



running in the bathroom, her work clothes on the floor.



 



I daydream of flashes and have visions of scars



studding the roads, the bodies, my mother and flowers



I left her, Fiji in the back seat and rosary beads



I prophesy the petals tearing, stems breaking into the night



as glass shatters the world and blends into her skin,



she doesn’t pick up and I’m still watching the war



 



footage from Iraq. Fallujah’s dust rises into towers



and creates people out of nothing, I blink and start



to think my eyes are deceiving me. Behind, my sister snores



and listening I think that the roof would be cold by now, heat



extinguished in the stars above the lamplights hanging, pinned.



This is the part where we find out she dies.