The Brown Boy is Looking and Listening

There are two places where the brown boy feels long. In the mirror, he stares first at his stomach which is perfect, framed by two small lines that cut into him and point to his feet which hurt from running. In the mirror, he cannot see his feet, but peers around to his muscular calves, turns his left leg in and thinks there could be a point to this action, an endless motion driving him down further as his body slips out of the mirror's frame. His left arm follows his leg. He is dancing. His hand curves with his foot. An arc, two. His knees stay strong and terse, solid, while his elbow breaks in back toward his side.

In the bed, he feels long, too. His arms gape around the white man's thick back and buttock. What makes him brown is not how he drapes the white man, but the feeling of how his side sinks into the papery sheets of the white man's bed, how his head releases into the softness of the pillow, how he gets to think of what his brain might be doing just then, and how one day, when the white man is dead, the brown boy will own this slow thought and its sinking in.

These are some of the white man's things which the brown boy will one day own:

1. 1. A clean piece of polished pine cut to an angle and resting over two HONN file cabinets.

2. 2. Perfect matte white window frames that open up to green, shiny leaves.

3. 3. The plant in the house that has spots, a crust of them on its biggest leaf, will die, but the brown boy will keep the ribbon that chokes its small mass together.

4. 4. The brown boy will get the $300.00 coffee maker.

5. 5. The sound of the radiator, kicking.

6. 6. He will take back the maroon office chair, the one he found on the street near the Towne House bar, the one the white man thinks is good enough.

7. 7. He will not answer to the white man's asking: What ah you doin?

8. 8. He will not have to hear the dental floss rip out of the case, and think about why the white man is wrong for flossing in the morning and not at night.
   The brown boy knows that meat, left between teeth for too long calcifies to bone. This hard substance, bone on bone, is a lot like the love that the brown boy lets build between he and the white man.
   
   Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
   
   Whenever the brown boy hears Tracy Chapman sing love in succession, it excites him, mostly because the litany rises then falls, blending into a single note. Sometimes the brown boy talks until his head feels like a cave that has been beaten from the inside with a club, over and over until he hears a low hum — this noise is at the heart of the brown boy's voice, the sound that's left after he is finally, silent.

9. 9. He will own the rattle of the blinds ripped open for light.