The Brother

[Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. francine j. harris’s “enough food and a mom” appears in the September 2014 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]

 

 

Recently, I’ve been reading poems that either deal with the loss of a brother, or a brother in danger. There’s no reason for the connection, except that the books happened simultaneously in my reading. I started Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovksy’s Revolver while reading Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother was an Aztec. Both reminded me of Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture and a particular poem in Jamaal May’s Hum. I took all four books and put a rubber band around them.

*

 I keep seeing Michael Brown’s body in the street. I keep thinking of the young men who have been gunned down recently by men more powerful than them. I cannot reach them. I have no control over their destinies, their fates. They are not my brothers by birth, but I feel something familial for them. I can’t shake this feeling.

It parallels my reading of the poems.

*

Natalie Diaz’s poem, “It Was the Animals,” actually comes after the publication of her debut, Aztec, which is themed, in part, around her brother’s addiction and her family life in its wake. Like aftershock, this newer poem narrates a moment when Diaz’s brother believes he has obtained a piece of Noah’s Ark, presumably from a woman. On it, he believes an inscription in the wood foretells the apocalypse. He needs his sister to understand this find, but also thinks it might be too much for her. “You should read it.” the brother says “But, O, you can’t take it – / no matter how many books you’ve read.”

Because Diaz’s poems often employ mythic elements to narrate situation, I am unsure what part of this poem is documentation, which part imagined. So the image of the brother with a piece of Noah’s ark already has a visual pulse, when she floods the poem:

He was wrong. I could take the ark.
I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.
The way they almost glittered.

It was the animals – the animals I could not take –
they came up the walkway into my house,
cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,
marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother

The stampede leaves the reader both helpless and in awe. I am not sure if this is metaphor for a medical episode, but Diaz effectively renders an image that conveys both the speaker’s dissociation and the physical forces inside her brother’s body that erupt between them.

*

When I was two years old, my mother gave birth to twins, whom she described as being born in complement: boy and girl, with a symmetric array of missing limbs, stillborn. Already speaking the language of twins, it was as if their first consensus was not to stay in this world. Growing up as an only child, I have thought about my never-brother and never-sister with names I would never know. Those doused lives have little to do with mine lived. And yet, there they are, rippling out. What would it mean - to have siblings. In particular, what would it mean – a little brother?

*

Throughout Black Aperture, Rasmussen achieves a singular focus, largely through resonance of imagery, sparse language and the order of the poems. The stark beginning of the first poem, “Trajectory,” sets a framework that carries the book. Consider the motion of the opening lines: “After spiraling twice / it exits the barrel, / the spent day exposing / a flame that propels it.”

That bright palette of flame and daytime, the curl of the bullet from the gun, make way for the second poem, “After Suicide.” According to Kathleen Rooney, this poem began the collection. In order to depict his brother, Rasmussen asks us to consider the negative space of the book’s opening image:

A hole is nothing
but what remains around it.

My brother stood
in the refrigerator light

drinking milk that poured
out of his head.

*

The footage of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell lying in streets was shot from too far away to see their faces. But their faces are beautiful, their eyes. How could anyone not see that?  Didn’t they look in their eyes?

*

It’s not the images in “Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral” from Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovsky’s Revolver, that stay with me, it’s the abrupt shifts in tone. The poems are oddly undressed, sometimes awkwardly tender, as when he opens “My Brother’s Grave,” by writing “Like a city I’ve always hated, driving through but never stopping / …

Hating even the children who live there
as if they had a choice, I imagine him
in his ten-million particles of ash, tied up into a beautiful white bundle of lace, a silver bow
looped where his neck should be

The self-assured voice I’ve come to associate with Dickman snags on those lines where he elegizes the brother. I think it’s intentional. These poems (clunky, self-conscious) have a lump in their throat. I stutter on the lines.

*

When the man filming Kajieme Powell in St. Louis last month realized he’d captured the police gunning him down, his commentary turned. Initially, he was laughing about the victim guarding the two shoplifted sodas he’d placed on the curb. But when Powell lay dead on the ground, the filmer says: “I don’t even know what to do.”

He says this twice.

*

The brother surprises me in Jamaal May’s “The Boy Who Bathes the Dead.” In this poem, which renders a boy playing in the dirt as if he were a medic finding soldiers on a battlefield, it’s the boy we are focused on. “Using only his hands,” the poet writes, “he quickly finds a limb / buried without a corpse.” Maybe we know that these are toy soldiers, but May’s language allows the intersection, as we learn of the boy’s diligent digging and then, as we meet the brother:

Until all soldiers are found and placed
     in separate ziplock bags,

his fingers rake soil,
     churn the dark earth. His brother

finds him afterward filling a sink to rinse
     the crevices and metal joints, worried

he bathes the plastic infantry too carefully.

There is an ambiguity here that undulates from that startling image. Is it the brother here, worried that the boy has unhealthy preoccupations? Or is the brother simply witnessing the boy’s own worry, over those small bodies he bathes?

*

In court, the defense attorney asked Trayvon Martin’s older brother, Jahvaris Fulton, if he recalled his initial response: When asked to identify the voice from an audio track of the screams that took place before George Zimmerman’s gunshots, the attorney wanted to know, did Fulton remember saying he wasn’t sure whose voice it was?

The brother considered this. He chose his words very carefully. He spoke slowly and gently and deliberately.

 “When we heard it in the mayor’s office, how do I explain? I wasn’t, I guess I didn’t want to believe that it was him, so that’s why during that interview I said I wasn’t sure. I guess listening to it was clouded by shock and denial and sadness. I didn’t really want to believe it was him.”