Contrasuture

First time I hear English in your mouth, you burn
with the smell of illicit brews, chopped kale and
three overripe tomatoes in a polythene bag between
your left rib and patched elbows.

Hours after English takes your mouth, word arrives of
municipal bulldozers lined to hole our beaten rooms.
Camouflaged officers, their wet loot of blood-red paint
marking houses for demolition, room for new police posts.

Your arthritic hands swollen just as well from
twisting a stable mattress-and-furniture origami
ligatured by your strict leather waist-braid, hauled into
the cheap flight of air by your hard school of obedience.

And a while later, I watched you, flickering beneath
a bent streetlamp, my leaver already, throttling past
the cratered kiosks, murmurous in the womb of
your reeking overcoat, onward to the bus station plaza.

The year of Englishes was the year of wet charcoal
scoops. Cold cassava lidded with tropic rainwater
boiled to fudge sweet as the sweep of found Milo
packets, prices quartered, notch after singed tear-notch.

What I prize of Englishes is the lick of tang-soured
count. Peals of laughter syllabled over the whir of
lost smokes. Teaching the townspeople improper,
illegible hide and seek from the watch of a flanked escort.

What I recollect of your, my Englishes is
the rote of your crackling baritone
hung in air so dirty, so urgent, so alive
but never in excess—