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[--e.]

Untitled

e.m. monteiro

 

for Khadro and Hodan

 

What I remember is hazy with

pain. Picking me up in your brother’s mini-van

to take me to the parking lot plantation where you used to

slave. Giving those people in dark mink and darker tux simple refugee

lines like, “I take care of car, sir. Nothing to worry. Nothing to need,â€

that unrecognizable accent

crimson colored like your uniformed shirt.

 

Why are we here in the wee hours of morning, after weeks of silence in

undercover of highway overpass, tucked where there are fewer cars,

where I hold you.

It hurts to hold you knowing I have no choice but to

comfort as your xooyo lays dying.

Never left alone for a second, a tribe of children that

love in shifts;

pain that is shared.

 

(For one week I pulled my hair out in the darkness that comes before light,

alone. Unclean, I pleaded with Maxamed knowing you did not believe. The dishes remained unwashed, the plants unwatered, and when I told you I began the process of fasting all this out of my organs

you laughed;

you called me ‘Drama’).

 

You whisper undercover of tinted windows: “My quilt is shattered.

There is nothing to patch up.†You are weak, and it is I who must hold-up your body.

It is the Haitian nurses and your sisters who stand stone faced and silent as

the slow passing of your mother goes through their bones.

You reach down and manipulate my legs,

for access, a leak changed to flooding in an instant,

those women, hard and silent;

though I wish, I am not unbreakable like them.

 

“I would like to trade places with my xooyo…†you say,

the headlights traveling the highway beside us

invading the sanctity of this space.

Do you really want to trade places with the woman who lived her own life to make sure your life would be better, pulled her hair out from the roots and screamed in all directions on empty ears? I wonder, while Maxamed pursued the art of oratory, if

Khadija sat in darkness; if she stayed focused on

 

 

her money

her business

her children

the life she had to lead beyond him;

could you have lived with that pain?

 

(it will be later and you will tell me how your father will not go to your mother’s grave,

the trip you planned as brothers made a detour.

“He would rather drink tea with his homies’ and argue about what’s happenin’

back home,†you say,

reject my response, grab your bag and slam the door.

“As though your father chooses

to remember your mother in this way?

May be his memory can’t be measured in square footage?â€

With you, some places cannot be touched).

 

Your sisters still go to work: phone calls around the world,

plans for people who will be arriving; they get the money straight,

make sure the men are maintaining; while you worry about history

and a past that cannot be escaped.

You flee;

you stay in one place.