Jennilie Brewster

Lament for Roy

I wish you were around so I could: Feed you fried chicken and not be grossed out when you took the wing in your mouth and spit the bone into the paper napkin I held beneath your chin. Place Lay’s potato chips onto your tongue and brush the yellow crumbs off of your beard. 

Take home your filthy red sweatshirt like I always meant to. Shout the stains and mend the stitched-on black letters that have come undone. You were supposed to be doing better, stable, they said, moved off ICU, till somebody—

I don’t know who found you hooked up to an empty oxygen tank. It was the virus, complicated by a blood infection from a pressure sore, which is what killed Sammy 2 years ago. 3 Times I visited him on the ICU and never saw a doctor, or a nurse who could tell me his prognosis.

When Sammy died, he saw fireflies. What did you see, Roy, when you took your final gasp? Allah or your brother Suluk welcoming you home? He brought you into our group and showed us you had something important to say.

Sometimes we rolled our eyes when you droned—but those Kentucky kids, they hung on every word. I’ve never been a good example in my whole life, you said, but I’m a damn sure good example of what not to be. And when you wept, we felt your tears inside. 

I called you our Knowledge Holder because you lived and remembered so much—a Black boy trying to get to the front of the bus. You and Suluk knew that as much as things have changed, it’s still the same. To the people in power: Black lives don’t much matter.

Your nurses were ordered to wait till the last minute before sending you to a real hospital with doctors and machines that could save your life. You were at death’s door leaving the nursing home on a gurney. The last thing you said to me, as if you couldn’t believe it, was, Jenny,

They left me in bed for a week.