Phonetics
by Clemonce Heard
for Kamau
I want to call my nephew something toxically endearing or endearingly toxic
like killa, but I don’t want him to kill.
I like lil gangsta
pressed out of John Leguizamo’s mouth in Chef
but off screen it feels like more nonexistence spoken
into fruition
;
the day my nephew comes home from practice with a black eye
and broken nose, snuck by a teammate thrice his size,
his great-grandmother worries.
One of his teammates was just kilt by another teammate
over drugs or money or a baby.
As you probably guessed when I say kilt
I’m not talking about the skirts Scots wear. When I say baby
I mean the boy who was killed had a baby on the way.
Snuck is self explanatory,
which is to say, use context clues.
Only those who remained
in the car know what really took place. Not even the gun knows what it did or didn’t do,
for its muzzle is not trained
to hear the scuffle before it wakes nor the sirens after
;
once, at a gas station in Algiers, a man who didn’t like me
and my nephew
chuckling at the dusty rap he was jamming raised his jacket
to show he was a killer or a gangster.
He muttered pussy
when I began paying
more attention to the pump.
The price and gallon trembling up.
If he’d fired at us
it’d be just my luck that his gun wouldn’t’ve jammed.
He might’ve turned my nephew into the evening news
his grandmother worries over
watching too many of the much too young to be called dead, murdered
;
my nephew wants his round
and a gun to stop
whoever rifled through his new car. His mother is scared.
Round is what our kids say
when they want to fight someone. Round is what my friends & me called each other. Round
is a monosyllabic bullet ‘round here.
Bullets stroll
around the corners ‘round here— round round round round
and the bullet returns
to where it was first fired.
His matryoshka wants him to turn
the page, but my nephew has his finger on a word. He underlines it, highlights it: blood, caution tape.
While trying to hook his finger around it, another boy,
above his age, is pronounced dead
at the scene of a word we can’t pronounce.