TESTIMONIAL

My mother knows how much I want my body

to be beautiful more than she knows to maintain

the flowering pattern on my father’s grave.

She remembers the day his coffin brushed past my

hip; on hands of men she could not help

carry. 

How later that night, when her aloe and herb concoction

could not reverse the permanence of the bruise,

she let me borrow her skin lightening cream and made me

rehearse a half applicable, half insane-to-follow manual.

And she remembers the scent of the dead,

but more so, the scent of a boy’s body on her first

daughter’s funeral clothes.

And she remembers the scent of the anointing oil

on the priest’s robe, and how his palms

ran carelessly through my father’s lifeless scalp,

but more of, how in between the moment, he followed the

movement of my twitching breast muscle as if

there would span a throb with the magnitude of one last goodbye.

On the night of my second baptism, my mother held the

baptism napkin close to the priest’s mouth

and collected every benediction to the last syllable of 

his incantation.

She made me tuck the napkin inside the neck

outline of my gown every night; that

way, my body will only grow towards godliness.

I am holding the napkin, and the hand of God in this poem

as my mother teaches me how to keep His breath

inside me in case a boy reaches for my mouth and gulps down my air.

She does not understand holding your breath for

a boy has nothing to do with air,

and I do not understand that she means well.

I am still looking for godliness in the skeletons

of other robe-less men.

The last one I held had palms eager than his fervent hiss

when I let him feel the bruise I sustained the day

my father’s coffin brushed past my hip.

“Your father must have felt the tremor.” He said.

I sunk into his body. He enveloped my grief.