Brother in Flight

by Sadiqa de Meijer

 

Look at him, awaiting scrutiny. He's as foreign as you make him. 
Already robotic lenses swivel. Perspiration's his constitution, was there 
in the damp boy who surrendered in the laundry to a nap—

were you never sheltered where you fell?

I know his eyelashes. Minding his luggage enough to secure it but not 
to seem armed. He was a cabbage in a grade school play. Boarding’s a perpetual
audition. Now he holds his papers out too early for their talismanic work.

I want you to know what he hasn't done. Hasn't asked for lamb biryani 
once last night, his father pounding garlic to a tabla tune. Black cardamoms
smoked over flames. An agent smirked smell this one? in a prior queue, 

another march through the gullet of his own nation. 

Hasn’t asked his parents to be here. One goodbye holds all the others
like a Russian doll; opens his mother’s floodgates, Ouse, Tana, Jhelum, which river
to even miss? My boy, my boy—that prescience of an ending, unaffordable. 

He doesn’t pray. Relinquishes coins, belt, shoes. Rivulet on his left temple. He 
has been separated from his conversation with mercy. He may name 
his future children Blake or Jill. The profile of his body scoured of relations,

which is all it takes to kill without killing. 

Forget it. Looking at him belongs to me. I did it for love before you ever gave 
a fuck. I asked his tormentors you and whose army, left a breadcrumb trail through 
the briars. If he flies, look at the country forming below his relieved exhale.

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