brother

“Mick,” I say, “This business has been a struggle between being
too honest and not being honest enough. And if
each line break must be an orgasm
I’m tired of faking it.”

Mick slurps his cappuccino shake like the weirdo he is.
“Mar Mar,” he blah blahs, “I don’t have many friends
who are men. Can we talk” about our thirst? He reaches
across my burger tray to pluck out my tibia

feeding it to his teeth, he asks, “Where’d you learn to fight”
and, “How come the greatest boxer in the world
is always a Black man?” Pulling out a hair pic, Mick
starts uncoiling my twist-out.

Too intimate. This is all too intimate.
Men were my first ugliness—
I’ve tried to avoid them whenever possible.
Mick drools up my ankle, nibbling a mural.

This would’ve been hunky-dory if only Mick
had touched me toward singing red azaleas
just as Alma Thomas touched canvases
into their own non-gender.

I stab his eye socket with my milkshake straw.
There’s little effect, except
he’s crying now
which makes this situation even more uncomfortable
for me. I’ve only cried twice in the last twelve years.
Once in middle school I sprained an ankle,
the same Mick just ate.
“Hey bro,” Mick pauses to say,

“Crying is good for you.
It took me a while to see it, but that’s our internalized
toxic masculinity talking. Don’t be
afraid” to feel. He puts my thigh back in his mouth.

The second time. It was a summer writing conference,
a party. All night, a tall man named Lionel stashed
blunts and filthy-boy lagers behind his breath.
He gripped

the hips of plenty women who told him stop. Eventually
he got right in my face, rapped some Naughty
by Nature verse. And I don’t hate Naughty by Nature
but when our faces are this close

it’s either I’m fighting or fucking you.
It becomes which family folktale to lend
your cheek—men who only left
the people they fucked or fucked up.

Friends warned me about Lionel—
about his overcompensation for the baldness.
Though no one warned about the lightskin Medusa stare.
Boils swelled my throat, clogging my “no.”

I’ve hated the sound of my voice since dropping
my childhood stutter. Maybe that’s why men eat at me.
I wish it had been a SZA song playing. Stirring my stomach
with R&B. I would’ve stood up for myself.

Or not.

I wish one of my mothers had told me what to do
when a man countries over me, holds my head between
his two options to twist it completely from my torso
or kiss the baby of my forehead as a brother.

Why didn’t I move? I knew I should’ve hit him. I knew
all lightskin men are cornballs, easily scared off. I knew
his Black mother spoiled him with one too many LEGO sets.
All I’ve tried to inherit, and he still manned me.

The next morning, Lionel was escorted from campus.
And I cried. I cried
in every shape I had.
And, admitting this to Mick, he undevours me.

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