Are you dead yet?
We’re writing letters to our future selves
wanting to know if we can outlive men with beautiful hands.
Are you dead yet?
It’s been months, years since I heard the voice of my husband
seen
felt his beautiful hands.
Are you dead yet?
A memory: thirty years ago, more, a young woman on the overnight bus to Nairobi.
A man with beautiful hands sits beside her.
His face is moulded by God and he is travelling with a baby.
He does not acknowledge her.
She closes her eyes to catch some sleep as the bus rambles over the Great Rift Valley.
His hand snakes over her body, making slow sensual moves along her arm and writing on her palm. The baby sleeps.
The young woman is confused, keeps her eyes closed.
No one else can, or will see anything.
Are you dead yet?
Another memory: thirty five years ago, more. Men in soldier uniforms unfurl their fingers from the guns they carry so they can pinch the hard seed breasts of young girls on the way to the market in Kampala.
Or smack their bottoms when they walk past.
In the heady days after liberation, after the government of Idi Amin had fallen, men in soldier uniforms were heroes, gods, killers.
Why would you let them touch you anyway?
Why would you?
Shrill voices of aunts and mothers keep the next encounter and the next one and the next one and the next one quiet.
No one cares or wants to hear us.
Are you dead yet?
We’re writing letters to our future selves
wanting to know if we can outlive men with beautiful hands.
Are you dead yet?
Me and my husband and his beautiful hands have a broken psychic connection.
He can no longer hear me.
Are you dead yet?
My skin no longer cares for the aesthetics of hands.
Are you dead yet?
A memory.
A few months ago, scant a year, I am relative to men in soldier uniforms and singers of love songs.
I hold a gun to my own head.
I sing myself a lullaby.
Are you dead yet?
The bullet shoots in both directions—or who else will see this beauty?
Same hands that caress this skin, same hands at my throat until my eyes bulge out, same husband of the beautiful hands.
Please, I whisper, please.
My voice is trapped in the tight of his right hand.
My body trapped by his against the wall, two feet from the door in Vancouver.
No one saw or heard anything.
No one ever does.
