By Daniel Echezonachi
we once had things in common
—Frank Ocean.
but this blank slate, all we now have
to write our scattered lives into shapes
& breathe our bloodless dreams into fruition.
I call you the vine. Always far from other trees.
My last howfar to you still unread. Reels unopened.
Say with all this silence, you grow as tall as Christ’s cross.
It doesn’t count as duty, brother, to love someone
who has laid his life at the feet of your love.
Because you would not talk,I take your silence as forgetting
How we didn’t have to make room for any angel of happiness.
How crammed our hearts were with the softest things.
I take your silence that you forgot these.
Or your silence a mute death. Your heart, sodden, brimming.
I take that you killed the beauty in your underskirts without a word.
So now you circle away from my messages, a platter of my yearnings.
Oh Primrose, heart flattened against the silence of disguised haemorrhage.
Oh Bloodroot, red like roughish distance, a riot on the skin of fraternity.
Oh Beetroot, an overdraft of acid for our flushed marrows.
How do I mould your name to the shape fitting a hagiography.
Sweet, cotton soft brother, grant me to draw you into the litany.
Patron saint of beautiful, silent, same-mothered brothers.
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