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  • For the Lost and So You Die Slowly
  • Kimberly Juanita Brown (bio)

For the Lost

1

My daughter is not a number, not a statistic for your momentary perusal. She has a life; she is mine.

That evening I asked her to hurry home. “No te olvides,” I told her while she brushed baby powder from the bottom of her pale pink blouse and smiled at me. No, Mama,I won’t forget.

Angela is somewhere in the desert of Juárez. I walk until the dry earth blisters my feet [End Page 62] and the sun forgets that I am there. I do this for my daughter.

2

It is not possible to tell one from another here, not any longer. Bones assemble— smoothed clean plucked of individuality. For us it has been that long. For us, moments converge like purposeful insects on dead flesh

The sun strips the air of its humanity, peeling back captive layers of the purgatory we linger in while anxiety creeps cautiously over necks. breasts. bellies.

And I am here. Waiting in the desert of Juárez.

Where several steps in any direction lead to a body, and the story it wants to tell. [End Page 63]

So You Die Slowly

Not like an urban martyr, pinned earthly encircled in a flame of gunfire not in the secret recesses of an assembled mob nor in the howl of a deepening night, but quietly like skin cells on a parsed-out body gracefully falling into invisible years cushioned by the mythology of black and woman.

patient. like the cancer that may very well consume you lightly plucking off this very life you never knew you didn’t own.

So you die slowly not in the early mourning song of manhood— interrupted not in the muffled explosion of bullets and betrayal nor in the blink of an eye,

but in a motion slowed by the illusion of your longevity softened, by the lull of bridges sturdy, muted by this very life you thought belonged to you.

And there will be no press conference, no rally in the streets. they will not make of you a cause, a purpose [End Page 64] but disappear inside of you so that they may claim—from a position of the protected— they never saw you lying there witnessing this very life you didn’t know was never yours. [End Page 65]

Kimberly Juanita Brown

Kimberly Juanita Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. A native of New York City, Brown received degrees from Queens College, CUNY, and Yale University. She is currently working on a collection of poems entitled Elegy for Roslyn’s Daughters. She lives and writes in Providence, Rhode Island.

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