DON’T CALL ME ‘BROTHER’

by Akhim Yuseff Cabey

after Orville Lloyd Douglas’s article, “Why I Hate Being a Black Man”

just because we ride daily a morning bus
among passengers whose gushing-faucet reasoning
to sit elsewhere we’ve used to soak our hair. never
call me ‘brother’ because with one hand we pick
and with the other we shape coils into afros
of spherical perfection we hope will one day titillate
arteries surrounding their hearts. or just because
we share a pair of abhorred lips you would put
a bullet in the back of even god’s head to have mummified
in these passenger’s angelic linens     then exhumed
by your imagination’s future race who’ll praise
the decay of all our phenotypical sins. no—
don’t call me, brother, because we’ve only ever been
the sort of slow burning birch for which fire
has no further use, the sort of slow southerly wind
finches refuse their wings. I am not you, you are not
me, we are not related on this trip to work or to school
or to hovels of worship where we’ll bend
our knees and pray we’ve shucked enough husk
to keep the lights on     the water running    the mirror
deflecting the abominable joy felt when one of them
finally lowers a body into the seat next to us.

Akhim Yuseff Cabey is a Pushcart Prize-winning author whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, the Minnesota Review, Chattahoochee Review, TriQuarterly, The Sun Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from the Bronx, New York, he lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches language arts and math.