Failure To Thrive
1.
Mother left a list of her enemies underneath my tongue with instructions to look the barbarians in the eye and spit napalm in their hair, roast them until their uniforms melt and dangle from their frames. For those left sputtering, still breathing, she said I must whisper clearly in their ears, “Who needs morals when you’ve got guns?”
It’s time to testify.
2.
My vile virility is vigilant, but the bellowing heaps bring no relief to a person frozen in grief like a mausoleum cherub. Every shameful tear shed in this ocean I cross cannot be accounted for, as clouds of salt react, divide, and one side invades the other, back and forth, until the love between mother and child swirls past in endless black rivulets. Surrounded by infantrymen hauling rows of skulls topped with blood and emptying them into the water, the screams come pouring out and then spread across the surface. Hands emerge with orange flames alight inside each of their palms. I roll in upon their fingertips and fall asleep to the languid flutter of flags.
3.
Born in the year of the bullet, I was left at the orphanage gate with my mother’s legacy howling beneath my foreskin, circumcised with my father’s dog tag. It’s not the world that revolves around you, my child, it’s the flies. Secession declared between their genes, split into north and south, it became a hostage situation. One side demanded my fingerprints, the other side demanded my fingers. No truce, so now I speak my father’s tongue with my mother’s tongue. Multi-helix intertwined, these veins with these vines, double crossing hair with eyes, making it even harder for me to identify the remains of invisible roots.
4.
At night I would listen for the footsteps in the hallway, soft knocks on the door and giggling when I opened it. In time, these children had crawled back up through the heavy soil, separated for so long from a familiar touch, clutching air for mother’s hair. The story book would explain that in years past these children drank from the pools of curiosity and then lulled to sleep, their bodies would convulse under the laying of hands. Their spirits would flee their fleshy domains, drained of all suspicion, into the black shapeless night. There, they would burn in the distance, these shining orbs, trapped souls in flames.
5.
Every single one of us must cross an ocean of fire, whether by foot or by sail. Tonight I’m at the beach head, barefoot, chased by the deafening roar of a flame thrower and crackling branches. My body sweats, writhes on blue sheets. Nightmares break open the bedroom door and rush under my pillow and whimper like a dying dictator sentenced to life on an island of his choice. Under the hot sky large hulls navigate around jagged edges of liver, lungs and heart. Sinking deeper, bobbing and struggling, I cling to anything that floats by: a bloated seagull or a fishing net. Fishermen on deck yell over the stormy waves questions for which I don’t have an answer. “Who was that woman carrying you in her belly all those months? Was it your aunt or your sister?!” Flames ripple on the roiling tips of waves and close in on my head.
Sleep, mother, is no comfort.
6.
Floating with my back to the wind, foam caresses my reflection that shrinks and expands with every chop of the oar. A vision of mother and father wrapped together in graceful ribbons of silence unravels from my ankles and sinks toward a nothing ever pleasant. The fishermen drag their nets in for the day. I walk up on the shore.
It’s time to rectify.