For my brother(s)
by Lauren K. Alleyne
My brother was a dark-skinned boy with a sweet tooth, a smart mouth, and a wicked thirst. At seventeen, when I left him for America, his voice was staticked with approaching adulthood, he ate everything in the house, grew what felt like an inch a day, and wore his favorite shirt until mom disappeared it. Tonight I’m grateful he slaked his thirst in another country, far from this place where a black boy’s being calls like crosshairs to conscienceless men with guns and conviction. I remember my brother’s ashy knees and legs, how many errands he ran on them up and down roads belonging to no one and every one. And I’m grateful he was a boy in a country of black boys, in the time of walks to the store on Aunty Marge’s corner to buy contraband sweeties and sweetdrinks with change snuck from mom’s handbag or dad’s wallet— how that was a black boy’s biggest transgression, and so far from fatal it feels an un-American dream. Tonight, I think of my brother as a black boy’s lifeless body spins me into something like prayer—a keening for the boy who went down the road, then went down fighting, then went down dead. My brother was a boy in the time of fistfights he couldn’t win and that couldn’t stop him slinging his weapon tongue anyway, was a boy who went down fighting, and got back up wearing his black eye like a trophy. My brother who got up, who grew up, who got to keep growing. Tonight I am mourning the black boys who are not my brother and who are my brothers. I am mourning the boys who walk the wrong roads, which is any road in America. Tonight I am mourning the death warrant hate has made of their skin— black and bursting with such ordinary hungers and thirsts, such abundant frailty, such constellations of possibility, our boys who might become men if this world spared them, if it could see them whole—boys, men, brothers—human.
Copyright © 2020 by Lauren K. Alleyne. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 14, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
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Very powerful! Thanks.
Powerful, the word I was choosing too. And so full of truth, it hurts.