“Prayer for the Untranslated Testimony”

Prayer for the Untranslated Testimony

by Franny Choi

At midnight, I am sitting on my back steps,
looking at the leaves and listening to the sound a boy is making
into the night with the peak of his lungs
somewhere in my neighborhood.
He is stretching the air, and I do not know what it means, this sound.
It sounds, I think, like a name, like the name of my friend “Fatimah,”
Fatimah, but with different letters.
I think maybe it sounds like a command,
a long and desperate spell which he makes of the air,
again and again
and now growing longer as he shouts it.
And if I ask my heart, rude translator though it is, to read back this sound,
what I hear rippling from the quiet floor of my chest
is, “Let me in, let me in”
or, “Open it, open it.”
And now in my chest vocabulary, there is also a door.
There’s also a blue light in the top window
and a face that will not appear.
And some of my friends I know have names that sound like this,
like, “I am here, I am here.”
Like, “Why won’t you answer?”
Like, “Why can’t you see me?”
And they are mostly not boys,
but do grow long and blue lit at midnight,
their spells, the women I know.
And today a woman sat in front of a panel of men
who I have to try to believe were too once boys,
who shivered in the yard.
A woman sat and had to say again and again,
“It happened, it happened”
and watch the glass panes of the once-boys’ faces remain unlit
and only echoing back with their short vocabularies,
“Are you sure? Are you sure?
Are you sure?”
So tonight, reaching up to hold hands
with the leaves stretching onto the back steps,
I say, “Please, let the spell grow legs.
Let my sisters’ names grow long as their hair,
long as they need to.
Let their names rattle the night air with their incessant lungs.
Let the sounds of their names burn blue in the night.
Let even their ugliest memories be named after the daughters of prophets.
Please, if there is a god, named for the humble undersides
of these leaves, somehow not yet dead,
let the names of my sisters make all the doors on my street fly open.
Let every tree sleeping in our chests claw awake
and rush out to answer that call.”

Peace, dwight