AMINA IRO

Alternate transcript;
notes I write by hand;

my bed knows my body in every position. the full sprawl of sleep. it held me, held me, held me. i did not ask questions; i failed statistics. i wanted to be in love. i failed that too, so now i have; this place bursts at night, party party party. they spill out of bars. hate looks so fun. they look so alive. nigeria’s economy is crashing or the president is fired or last goodbye my father had to give at dulles was $, so when will he even come home; i kept [                     ] name safe. no reason i have made a bandage has closed the wound. she called me a [         ]. or I was the only [         ] in the room at the time; held me, held me, held me; sophomore year didn’t happen. nobody asked where I was or why; everyone in the room was Black. i still wanted to cry. i waited for applause; i want my brain back. i’ll pay for the stole that says it. i will, i will and i’ll wear it on top;

& the sun shakes loose

& uncurls her tendrils long to touch me. & throws 
her sparkling sheet down dazzling between buildings.
& rains her glittering warmth. & makes everything
a diamond. I reach back, un-sad, un-sleep, un-winter,
molt out of the pale, dry, dead dead weight of an old
skin. something melts,                           I don’t care what,
onto something else & wets the surface into softness.
I dive into this new crysal ocean

& finally learn to swim.

Capsule
          After Claudia Rankine

When I hear about Brother Hakim’s passing via Facebook, I share and ask for folks to donate. It’s literally the least I can do, so why not? The algorithm knows what I like, where I stop scrolling, and how long I linger. It knows my race (African American), my US Politics (Liberal), and what kind of phone I have (Galaxy S5), all listed as parentheticals as if to say, “yes, it is real, and we know it is. But no, it does not matter.” The algorhythm knows me as a friend, a sister, a daughter.  I belong to many villages, have raised many children, so yes, it is right in that I am somehow a parent, too. It makes a distinction between being away from my hometown and away from my family. Both are true.

Grief is harder, less willing to be named. Facebook mistakes grief for liking, so I do too. I see his face on my Newsfeed and smile. The post is small, grey, and not all there before I click “read more.” I read it all but it does not register. I tell myself            later;              I have always felt after the fact. I scroll and learn of ten other deaths
back to
back to
back to
back to
back to
back to
back to
back to
back to
back. Grief,
however many times removed, washes in waves, each shockingly cold.

Each like the very first time, the waves hit and hit and hit and hit and hit and hit and hit and hit and hit and hit without caring that I never knew how to swim in the first place. Sure, I had taken classes. But when the instructor lay face down in the water floating, clearly an expert at her craft, I said “I do not want to die” and refused the water for every class that came after.

This is not about me, but I want to shake Mark Zuckerburg. More so, to sink my nails into to the flesh of Mark’s shoulders, ask what he does to stay alive each day. I don’t mean to put all the blame on him. It’s just easy to have a name and a face. It is easy, and I deserve something easy in this hard time. I doubt he even knows the Sillicon Valley transplant whose Newsfeed is so alive as to wish it on everyone. Or the executive with too much money or whiteness to see anything but.

Many mouths, the collective conscious, echo something about empathy being the solution. Or at least part of our deliverance from causing one another pain.  I wonder how many times I have died Facebook’s algorithmic death for the sake of empathy. Maybe not enough. Maybe know when I tell myself       now.   

By the day after his passing, Brother Hakim has 20,000 new digital US dollars in his name. Had I not deleted the app when I did, first thing in the morning, too tired to second guess anything, I would have believed that I owed Facebook, Mark—whomever’s history points to or lets off—a thank you; we could not save Brother Hakim’s life, but we kept enough friends to honor him after.

Brother Hakim did his work on Earth, we did not do it for him. Most everything I know of Islam I learned from him. When he yelled my last name as a greeting, his voice boomeranged through the hallway and caught all three of my brothers and I on the way back. This is how we learned to be siblings, how we learned to share the name equally. His blessings were hard earned from morning lectures in the big musallah and loving banishment from the recitation line in Hifz Class because “You and I both know you’re not ready. Come back when it is in your heart.”

I thank Allah for this.
This too, is grief.

First Life

I know my Black by                            land,               
the number of                                      oceans in between,    
safe flights through                            man’s time zones, better than
my family history:
                                      diabetes,
                                      heart disease,
                                      glaucoma.        schooldays, my mother collected
                                                                 rocks and clay by the river.
                                                                 until one little girl slipped in.
Everyone ran away    
                                      from death,      red-footed and sticky, soaked in
                                      sweat and         each other, sprinting towards 
the same village,                                   their spoils smeared across their
                                                                 foreheads in relief, unclaimed by the day.

                                                                 My mama talks on the phone
                                                                 to women from her
                                        first life,          says she could never go back,

second life
silhouetted                   Black blood,
                                        Black heart,
                                        Black eyes,

clay body turned tar.                            Laughter most abundant
                                                                  when she thinks me asleep.

Amina Iro, a Prince Georges County, MD native, holds a B.A. from UW-Madison in Neurobiology and English Creative Writing. Amina has performed in venues including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, the Washington Convention Center, the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, IL, and the State Theatre in Tshwane, South Africa. Her work can be found in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Melaninspeaking.com.