by Sarah Kay
my face as I watched her fall.
BRICKLAYER
It is snowing in New York and the Bricklayer’s hands are cold.
He should have worn gloves—would have worn gloves
if he had thought there would be a chance of snow—but it is
April for God’s sake. Sometimes my father yells so loudly,
he scares himself. Then he has to sit somewhere very still
and very dark to return. Sometimes there is hair in the shower drain,
sometimes the jacket doesn’t fit. This hat is itchy, Mother,
and my fingers hurt. Someone has to build this wall. This house,
this family, someone has to place the bricks just so. I will not be
home in time for the holidays. Make sure someone says grace at the
table, make sure someone says thank you. Sometimes my father
wanders room to room in the early hours. He stalks the ghosts
that walk our hallways. The Bricklayer’s back is hurting. He bends
into himself like a folding chair, his flannel does not keep out
the snow. This head is itchy, Mother, and my fingers hurt.
FOREST FIRES
I arrive home from JFK in the rosy hours
to find a new 5-in-1 egg slicer and dicer
on our dining room table.
This is how my father deals with grief.
Three days ago, I was in the Santa Cruz
Redwoods tracing a mountain road
in the back of a pickup truck, watching
clouds unravel into spider webs.
Two days from now, there will be
forest fires, so thick, they will have to
evacuate Santa Cruz. The flames will paint
the evening news a different shade of orange,
and when it happens, I will be in New York City
watching something else on TV. Commercials,
probably, which is all that seems to play
on hospital television sets: the beeping
from the nurses’ station mixing with sales jingles—
the theme song for the ailing. My grandmother’s tiny body
is a sinking ship on white sheets. I hold her hand
and try to remember open highways.
It really goes to show that it doesn’t take
much with these dry conditions to start a fire,
a Cal Fire spokesman will tell CNN on Sunday.
Fire officials have been working tirelessly, but
controlling something this big is impossible.
My mother will point at the celluloid flames,
remind me how lucky I am, how close I had been,
how narrowly I missed this disaster. My father
will point out a commercial for the Brown & Crisp,
repeat line by line how it bakes, broils, steams,
fries, and barbeques. He will write down
the number to order it later.
Three days ago, I was barefoot. Balancing
on train tracks, the full moon an unexpected visitor,
the smoke-free air as clean and sharp
as these city lungs could stand.
Two days from now I will find my father
making egg salad in the kitchen, exhausted
after an all-night shift at the hospital. I will
ask if he needs help and understand
when he says no. I will leave him to slice
and dice the things he can. My grandmother
folds her hands on mine and strokes
my knuckles like they are a wild animal she is
trying to tame. She tells me I am gorgeous,
watches a commercial, forgets my name,
tells me I am gorgeous again.
My father watches from the bedside chair,
his mother and daughter strung together
with tightrope hands, fingers that look
like his own. And somewhere in California
a place I once stood is burning.
POPPY
Poppy is four years old. The only shelf in the cabinet she can reach is the one with the plastic Tupperware. She has started filling containers with water, snapping on lids, and placing them about the house. It is her new favorite game. One for Mama, one for Papa, one for Tessa, one for Ollie. Her hands can hold one at a time. Her dress is the color of marmalade, she chirps songs that have no words.
When Poppy is twenty-five, she will follow a love to France. In the summertime she will make jars of cold tea, place them in the sun to steep, forget them in the sunny corners of their house. He will love her for this. That, and the daisies in her hair; the way she reads in doorways, purring show tunes to the crinkle of the page.
When she is forty-seven, Poppy’s garden will be the talk of the street. Her French Tulips will dip over the sidewalk, dragging leaves against the pavement. She will carry jugs of water—overflowing onto her arms, her overalls—back and forth from the house to the yard. This is her way now, since her son has worn holes through the garden hose with his trike. She does not mind. He rides circles around the jugs while she sings and turns the soil.
Eighty. And Poppy carries cups of water to leave around the house. One to the desk for while she is writing, one to her bedside every night. The walk to the kitchen is long and her lavender nightgown is thin. Open the cabinet, find the cup. Turn on the tap, fill it up. Snap on the lid, off to bed. She hums to the radiator. Sometimes she forgets the words.
SOMETHING WE DON’T TALK ABOUT, PART I
One night when it got really bad,
she left right in the middle of dinner.
She got up like she had forgotten
the olive oil but instead she picked
her keys off the rack like a small skeleton
in her hand. She pushed the elevator button
slowly, as though turning off the oven.
She waited for it to reach our floor,
she pulled open the heavy metal door.
She walked in, pressed 1. We watched it happen.
All three of us. The steering wheel of our family
being pulled out through the dashboard.
The slow-motion tire screech.
That empty highway. I remember trying to listen
for the elevator doors closing in the lobby.
PK said, She took her house keys, answering
a question nobody had asked.
I didn’t tell him that even after a crash,
a key still fits the ignition.
There just isn’t anything left to drive.
We kept eating the meal she had made.
I kept listening for a jingle of metal.
But only radio static filled the room,
not a single siren blared. Not even one.
DRAGONS
My father and brother were born
with cannonball fists. Avalanche tongues.
They know how to light flame to the
smallest injustice. How to erupt into
fireworks from the inside. The silent
anger too. They are capable of keeping
the engine humming, the deep vibration
of fury warm underneath. Me—I was
not born with enough fuel. My anger
often melts into sadness, it will just
disintegrate into shame or fear, my
clenched teeth release into chatter.
But you have found the right mix of
arrogance and alcohol. Place your hands
on me one more time, then again, exhale
the cigarette into my eyes, tell me again
how I’m just not understanding the point,
remind me how you are an expert, touch
my knee, my thigh, my lower back, ignore
me twice, three times, continue talking over
me with the man to my right. There is a
beast in my veins that was birthed by my
father. It is quiet, it sle
eps through most
nights. Tonight, sir, my tail twitches in
the darkest caves. Be careful, darling.
Your footsteps land heavy here. Your
racket will wake the dragons.
HAND-ME-DOWNS
You have taken to wearing around your father’s
hand-me-down anger. I wish that you wouldn’t.
It’s a few sizes too big and everyone can see it doesn’t
fit you, hangs loose in all the wrong places,
even if it does match your skin color.
You think you’ll grow into it: that your arms
will beef up after all the fighting and it will sit on your
shoulders if only you pin it in the right places with
well-placed conviction.
The bathroom mirror tells you, you look good,
your fists look a lot more justified.
When you dig your hands deep into the pockets,
you’ll find stories he left there for you to hand out
to the other boys like car bombs.
On days when everything else is slipping through
your fingers, you can wrap yourself inside of this anger.
This will keep you warm at night, help you drift off to sleep,
with the certainty that no matter what happens,
it will still be there when you wake up.
The longer you wear it, the better it fits.
Until some of those stories are your own. The holes
in the sleeve are from the bullets you dodged yourself.
When it rips, snags on a barbed wire fence or
someone else’s family, don’t worry.
Your mother and your sister will mend it:
patch the holes, sew the tears, replace a button or two.
They will help you back into it and tell you how proud
they are of you; how good it looks on you. The same way
it looked on your dad and your granddad, too.
And on his father before him and on his father before him.
But back then? Back then there was only sand. Until someone
drew a line. Someone built a wall. Someone threw a stone.
And the crack in the skull that it hit fractured perfectly
like twigs on the branches of a family tree, so someone
threw a stone back. And each fracture, each tiny break
wound itself together into thread. The thread pulled itself
around him, your great-great-great-great-somebody.
And on the other side of the wall, they were knitting just as fast and
theirs fit them just as well, only in a slightly different shade.
So I’m asking, when the time comes, who is going to be
the first to put down the needle and thread?
Who is going to be the first to remember that
their grandfather suffered just as many broken windows,
broken hearts, broken bones? And the first time
you come down to dinner, and your son is sitting at the
dining room table wearing your hatred on his shoulders,
who is going to be the first to tell him it is finally time to take it off?
(This poem begins and ends with the song “Shosholoza,” a Ndebele folk song that some hail as the “unofficial” or “second” national anthem of South Africa. It was sung by migrant workers in South African mines as a song of resistance and solidarity. The very rough translation is: Moving fast, moving strong, through these mountains like a rolling train to South Africa. You are leaving, you are leaving through these mountains like a rolling train from Zimbabwe.)
SHOSHOLOZA
Shosholoza, ku lezontaba stimela siphume South Africa
Wenu yabaleka, ku lezontaba stimela siphume Zimbabwe
Noor Ebrahim had fifty homing pigeons.
He lived in District Six at the center of Cape Town.
Noor Ebrahim lived with fifty pigeons in District Six
at the center of Cape Town, where there were twelve schools
and the Holy Cross Church and the Aspeling Street Mosque
and the Jews on Harrington Street. With the immigrants and
the natives, the Indians and the Malaya,
the Blacks and the Coloureds. Noor Ebrahim lived with fifty pigeons
in District Six at the center of Cape Town, where there was
Beikinstadt Bookstore and Parker’s corner shop; where you could
buy bread and paraffin for the stove, fish oil, bulls-eyes
and almond rock; where you could walk to the public baths,
pay a ticky, get a fifteen-minute shower, and find yourself between
the gangsters and the businessmen bathing side-by-side, right there,
at the corner of Clifton and Hanover Streets.
Noor Ebrahim lived in District Six at the center of Cape Town.
With fifty pigeons and his family.
Now watch.
Take 1 city: Cape Town.
Divide it into 12 districts.
Now take one of them, District 6,
add 70,000 people over time.
Divide that by the Group Areas Act of 1950
and you wind up with what?
I will give you a hint. It is the same as if you were to divide by race.
So you are left with a remainder of 1 Apartheid Government
and 1 declaration of 1966 which stated that from now on District 6
would be officially recognized as a designated whites-only area.
So, no more Hanover Street with the thick smell of curry
coming from Dout’s café, and no more Janjura’s groceries,
Maxim’s sweeterie, Waynik’s school uniforms, and the sound of
children. Shoppers. Merchants. Buses. Laughter. Song. No.
At the end of all that, you are left with only bulldozers.
Leveled buildings. Razed land. Broken glass and brick.
Not even phantoms will haunt this ghost town,
because even their floating figures are not white enough.
Noor Ebrahim moved the ten kilometers to Athlone.
He packed fifty pigeons into their cages and left District Six
at the center of Cape Town. He left the Peninsula Maternity Home
where hundreds of coloured babies were born every year
and the soda fountain where you could sit and watch the ladies bring
their laundry down to the public washhouse three times a week.
He left his house on Caledon Street.
Noor Ebrahim left his home on Caledon Street in District Six
at the heart of Cape Town and moved the ten kilometers to Athlone.
He lived there for weeks, sometimes driving
past the empty pit of land where District Six no longer stood.
The winds blew hard, and they swept through the dust and the dirt
and the broken glass until every blade of grass bent
beneath the weight of what was no longer there.
After three months, the droppings at the bottom of the birdcages
had become three layers thick. Noor Ebrahim decided it was time
to let the pigeons fly free—fly free so they could find their way back.
He knew that not all of them would return that night.
He knew that the next morning, some of those cages
might not be as full. But he also knew that sometimes gravity
can become a little too comfortable.
So that morning, Noor Ebrahim opened the doors on the cages,
and the winds that swept through Cape Town swept through and
lifted all fifty pigeons up into the air in a cloud of feathers, as if to say,
It does not matter how long we have been kept in cages.
It does not matter how strong your gravity is.
We were always meant to fly.
That night, Noor Ebrahim returned from work.
He turned off the car
, went around to the back of the house, and
cried out in pain. Not a single bird had come back to him.
The cages were lined with droppings and feathers, but no pigeons.
The man who had watched them level his house to the ground
without shedding a single tear, now felt his mind go cloudy and his
ribcage felt as empty as the ones the birds had abandoned.
He got back into the car to take a drive and clear his mind.
As he drove down the long streets of Cape Town,
the wheel moved beneath his hands and he found himself
on the abandoned roads of District Six.
As he reached Caledon Street, Noor Ebrahim slowed to a stop.
Because there on the empty plot of land where his house once stood,
were pigeons. All fifty of them.
Standing amongst the dust and the dirt and the broken glass,
looking up at him as if to say, Where is our home?
South Africa. We sing a song of strength.
We go on like a rolling train forever.
We never let gravity become too familiar.
Because we were always meant to fly.
Shosholoza, ku lezontaba stimela siphume South Africa
Wenu yabaleka, ku lezontaba stimela siphume Zimbabwe
INDIA TRIO
I.
Outside my window, through the orange drapes,
I can see a light on in the building facing mine.
It is late now, an hour past when well-behaved
citizens will have gone to sleep.
Who finds themselves restless in this
perfect heat? Perhaps it is two people, lying
next to each other on the mattress, sheets
thrown to the ground, knotted on the floor.
It is too hot for lovemaking. Too hot even
for touching. No, I am sure they have both just
been lying there awake, sweating into their
pillows, breathing in the muggy darkness, both
hands placed by their sides, fingers spread
open. They have both been lying still, one
of them desperately trying to fall asleep, the
other measuring the distance between their
fingertips, waiting until the humidity becomes
too wet, the fire on the skin too near; waiting
until this moment to turn on the bedside lamp.
Deciding finally, to honor this kind of arousal
