Brother as Younger Self, Humming

The streets of Shobra are still traced

with music from years ago—

children ripping

the clothes off lines,

pins scattering in a rounded clatter

of sharp-throated wooden notes.

It might have been a merging

of Mohamed Fouad

and Mohamed Mohy

or Mohamed Fawzi,

and my brother (also a Mohamed)

is sitting in the shimmering corner

of our grandma’s balcony with one leg up.

He wants to finish this one song

because it has his favorite parts,

which he has rewound a few times now,

and Mahmoud is downstairs again

yelling, holding a peeling board game

they taped together, and my brother’s eyes glint

over to the chorus, remembering how Mahmoud

once told him how his father comes home

only once a month, and he feels bad

he is taking so long to go downstairs

but this would be the last time

he rewinds the song, Mahmoud, wallahi,

he yells, the cassette player’s volume

on high but not loud enough

to drown out the street-market prices,

the chatter of bent men

at the coffeehouse, their fingers caterpillar-like

through the mugs, blowing

on clouded tea,

but the music is just enough

to shroud it all in the blur

of a filmy fog that Mahmoud can hear

and he can’t help but remember

how sometimes at night,

if he closes his eyes hard enough,

he hears the din of keys

against the door,

the whistling of a man

nearly always caught

in the middle

of an unfinished song.