I don’t know how my brother forgave

the doctor who missed the melanoma

on his scalp and tried to freeze it off

before it came back and was everywhere.

Or how he let his body be cut, radiated,

sequenced, lasered, scanned, poisoned

for eight years. My body still aches

that his is not here, not anywhere. 

This week, two men, George and Antwan,

were shot by police, one for sleeping

in his car, another for holding an air

rifle, each someone’s brother.

This four-hundred-year-old cancer

with cells that divide, repli­cate, spread

and grew from men’s greed into

ideas about bodies’ pigments,

the same melanocytes that ran amok

inside my brother. We shoot first

and ask ques­tions later, my father

posted on the sign at his gate.

My pink skin easily burns. My luck

wraps around the world like a god’s arms.

I have this one hidden place where

my brother and mother were. There are

fields, endless, Amer­i­can, full of holes

that each lead to an under­ground network

of caves filled with eye­lash­es, a crooked lip,

a certain chuckle, an eye’s par­tic­u­lar brown.

Am I also just waving a flag on which

I’ve painted, I’m one of the good ones?

Let’s agree to no more signs or flags or statues

except those with the names of people we

should not have lost. Person on the low end

of the melanin-spec­trum, I’m talking just to you

right now. You, Dad. The week by his bedside

you barely slept. We have to check our skin

and square our pain with wildflower-cratered

hollows and fields in every direction

if you look. My brother’s gone from cancer—

not a night­stick sixteen gen­er­a­tions long.