initial intake appointment
BY QUINTON OKORO
i keep having these dreams where i’m being held
by someone who loves me. i nearly froze to death
at the age of eight in a new york winter
the month my mother lost me and i lost myself
to hands that talked playful but played
too rough against the small of my birdish back.
i sat navy blue and shining in the white sun
on the steps of a subway entrance, patient
in being missed, unsure of what the danger was,
unable to look my mother in the face
as she ran out of the womb
of brooklyn and into the daylight.
her gift to me then was shame and a bath
to force the heat back into my bluing flesh.
she poured the warm water over my head.
in my dreams the water shimmers with light
above me, fragmented like grief in the wind,
foamy waves cresting against the edges
of my subconscious. a man i do not love
yet tells me i hold my breath when i sleep,
says he watched me dance from my side
of the bed to the corner he stole
into, says it looked like i was trying
to keep from drowning, that at one point i begged
for something from the bottom of my restless
sleep but he grew afraid and kept quiet
as my tone became more and more insistent.
in the morning i do not ask him why he
put his hand on my hip and pulled me toward
him because i did not want him to know
i was awake. i’m feeling a lot better
than i was a year ago. i promise i’m telling
the truth. god hates a liar, or whatever i said
to that white woman in the field of roaring blue
plastic seats and LED screens
huge and bright in my madness. our team
lost but an hour before that i fled the arena
and begged alongside jolene’s victim
in the UberXL i called to accommodate
myself and all my disappointment.
i scorned that woman to hell.
maybe i really was sitting in her seat.
i hope her kids cursed even the back of my head
for gifting them her sullied mood and then vanishing
into the ruined evening, my breaths
crushed and laboring under a streetlamp,
the light cascading from above
almost like water rushing down the face
of a mountain crag. i’m old enough now
to know some things about myself. i know i am good
at running away, and i am best at not caring
about anything at all. i wish i cared more
about horses. sometimes i find myself awake
in an endless field of sweet wild grasses,
sunlight drifting into the spaces between
my eyelashes and settling around my vision
like snow. running,
not away, just for the heavy sound
of hooves against the hard earth,
my lungs filled with blood and blue effort,
my back embracing the cool spring winds.
i think i must have been a horse
before i was a child, headed nowhere, not
lost, not wanting to be found, untamed, glorious.
the secret
BY QUINTON OKORO
my sister found out, and was instructed to keep her mouth shut
and so she immediately told me. because of course she would.
i swallowed her words with the purse of my lips and a cup of salt;
she was fond of making suits out of stories and wearing them
until the holes became large enough to devour any kind beast,
until her tongue, threadbare, would finally quit gnashing against
the back of her teeth or catching itself on kindergarten canines,
sometimes long enough to manifest as an apology,
or the wooly underside of a sheepish grin.
years later, my mother—tired in an arterial way,
fed up and fed up until she was bloated, her convictions stinking
with doubt, her kitchen neglected
under thick canopy of synthetic hair—spit it out and across the table.
it sat in a heap of shame and saliva. no one wanted to touch it,
but i watched it ooze and wriggle and remembered
its rough, brackish journey down my own gullet those many years ago.
“oh, yes. we knew,” and my mother’s shuffling, high laughter
was enough to quell our discomfort, quiet the beast. “oh? he told you?”
and we nodded, grinning teeth inside red mouths suddenly hungry
for more of this sharp and pungent truth: “who, what, when, where, why. and how.”
so she told us, “you have been raised by a man with very little.”
yes, yes.
the only thing my father ever had was his god. and his other family.
i chose again to open the door
BY QUINTON OKORO
inside there was a little boy rolling marbles
in his palms brown as bird feathers.
he smiled at me and i peeked
my eye through the keyhole of his missing
two front teeth. i could see
my crooked, swollen body, vulnerable,
twisting, splayed, raging against death
who’d swaddled me in her silver arms.
the child asked me who i was and i was
shaken by the sound of my own voice,
as if the call had echoed off the walls
of the shadowy corridor and returned
to nest itself in my throat.
i looked around—
there was my sister on the wall,
pinned into the blue
regalia of her middle school graduation,
gap-toothed and bug-eyed against
the ochre-colored walls in my mother’s house.
there was another family portrait,
one we hadn’t yet taken when we lived
in this moldy, teetering one-bedroom apartment
in brooklyn, the five of us
stuffed like olives onto one king-sized mattress.
there was the grandfather clock tick-
tick-tick-ticking, its dim echo
flooding the dining room,
pooling around my feet—
there was my foot,
there were my hands,
there was my face
at the top of the water—
i’d seen this scene before—
yes, the roots of the willow
tree boring into the bed
of the river, yes the river
’s gentle push against my body
untethered under fractals of
swimming moonlight,
yes, the moon,
yes, the moon, yes,
the everlasting moon—
there was the stuffed bear my father
gifted to me on the night before
my eighth birthday, when i looked so much like
this young thing standing before me,
now slurping and sucking on his marble
with the urgency of a child relishing
in the sweetness of a treat forbidden to him.
he reached his hand out, offered me
a red one, shiny like an apple—
