Two Poems

Saturday morning my hair meets this drain

The blinds I fold open to
so many sunflowers would sing— 
outside, a girl is image-making. 
Fall into her: be American. 

And see that girl fall into ground. 
Her eyes sing wetly, the wet joins snow.  
Her gloved hands rub her red face red. 
Leave my window—her parents’ eyes. 

Shower, scrub hard:
no American girl pressed beneath. 
These kinks clog underneath.

Not a snow day

Please stop. Enough froth over this land
and the traffic fills with impatient radio—  

or radio’s the only pinprick of voice 
nearer now than skin. A child asks to touch me 

and I tell her not to. She pokes me.
I swab the itchy lengths of my nostrils and God 

says again, do you like it when I touch you 
like this? Everything familiar and awful always

and the test tube carries me to a lab. This morning, 
the shower’s water is careful and warm. But the air—  

I walked in late to school and the same child here
waiting just outside the door, sleepy and shivering. 

I sanitized her hands. I teach her how to divide. 

Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. He is the author of the chapbook Nearness, forthcoming from The New Delta Review and is an inaugural member of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. He has also served as a Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and the first Diversity and Inclusion Chair of The Harvard Advocate. His poems are published or forthcoming in Lana Turner, The Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. He mains Ken in Street Fighter.

Artwork by Noor Althehli