Spoon
(2024)
Cancer cells swelled in her stomach, soldiers treading
their way to her chest, a steady march to her limbs
until the chemotherapy withdrew from the eight-month battle and her breath
slowed to the sound of quiet air after the rain.
Her fingernails were painted purple from two nights ago to cover
the maize-yellow nail beds that slowly began resembling the blue-grey sky
framed by the single rectangular window in her room. Long faint strips of sunlight fell
on the blanket cradling her legs as if they knew what she knew.
She lay there, eyes closed, and I wanted to shake her back
into our Wednesday afternoon so she could hear the bluebirds
chirping outside in the Ohio spring. Each peck and tap on the window shrunk and dripped
to the rhythm of the heart monitor as if the birds also knew what she knew.
In her right hand, fingers loosely held a stainless-steel spoon still
wet with vanilla yogurt — her favorite. The etched design on the spoon seemed to unfurl,
expand, and then tighten like a rosebud. My eyes follow and trace a knitted petal dangling
from a spool of lavender yarn cradled in a hospital-white blanket on her lap.
I look at her stiff fingers and selfishly wonder
“Without her, how will I learn to knit?”
A brief childhood memory gathers its legs and runs
to the present: a mango tree floating in Lake Kyoga after a lightning strike
as if it also knew what my mother knew: when to let go.
Kitenge Dreams
(2024)
My mother walked into my dreams twice last week.
She’s 26, pregnant with my brother, and wearing
a blue, flower-print kitenge
that swallows
her legs — now sticks.
The cloth wraps around her hips, growing stomach,
a wide skirt
that flails to the floor,
a canopy for her swollen ankles.
She stands against the wall
at Wandegeya apartments
listening to the noise and
the laughs and the chatter
from the direction of Makerere University and she hums
while she dances
to music that only she can hear,
music that I pretend to hear.
We sway and spin and flow
and gently merge like pixels on a broken TV screen
until the ring of my alarm clock
pulls me out of another kitenge dream
into this world where she no longer
lives and I exist, without her.
A fickle world that
continues without a flinch
or a glance or a pause.