Red Ribbon Elegy

I’ve struggled desperately to remember your face but on blue nights, rain washes my eyes and suddenly I’m trying to recount the reflections of my youth, and of the youth I haven’t yet or hadn’t lived and the youth I missed and will miss. 

I’ll miss you! If cows miss their milk and cheese, their fat-free, or their millionth burger baby, I’ll miss you like that. And if tonight, I remember the morning orange and blow dust off a surface with a hearty sigh, I’ll miss you just like that. 

But you are just people, and people who only exist in pictures are like pulses in a timeline you’ve never lived. There is a call in my heart to say your name and your name again. These are the minutes before the yellow dawn fades into gray and the sun recalls that I do not know you at all. 

This is how I’ve lived, where I meet you in a dream or you meet me in a nightmare. Where the red spider lily touches my palms before you pull it away. Where a word of goodbye sits on the tip of my tongue but I— 

You lay dead in a rural hospital on the edge of town. Termites ate away at the cracked floorboards and the trees screamed against the wind through the open windows. Your skin was blue. 

You died in a bathhouse, between here and Port-au-Prince, where immigrants bred their young against tile scum and boiling flesh, rippled like the low-tides of the sea, red like the ribbon I tied to say goodbye, mommy. 

Thank you, mommy! And death to you. Death to the care you couldn’t give and your will and your light. Forever, I’ll remember you for your weak body and all you’ve given me. The life you breathed into me swallows my white blood cells and perhaps that is why I miss you. 

Although I can’t remember the texture of your hair. I can’t remember if my eyes looked like yours. I was only a baby. Death to my memory. 

Without fault, you birthed me. Faultlessly, you killed me. However dead you are, you are not to blame. It is only that I cannot leave you; I, too, died as that man stalked through the steam.