Astronauts

Monroe Sr’s funeral was just like Monroe Jr’s wedding,
and the kitchen still echoes open laughing women’s mouths.
Junior’s twin boys, now about five or six,
are out front, wrestling in the dirt, then running.

You shout out the front window,
‘Boys, don’t mess up your church clothes!’,
and your brother takes his cue, heads out to
the stoop to smoke and brush off their dust.

Junior leans into the piano, tie still untied,
standing amid too many hothouse flowers,
mouthing thank you. Down the narrow hallway,

in the back room, you find your cousins
Willie Mae, Tiajuana and Lestine
telling you to hurry. Everything in that room is aloft,

spinning: the black dresses, arms, stockings, lipsticks.
Willie Mae asks Lestine for the fourth time if she
took her medication. Lestine just nods and Tiajuana

sits, limbs folded neatly as linens. Lestine points out
that tattoo you’d forgotten curling around your spine.
Their freshly dead dropped like an anchor. You’re hurtling

forward in space. They ask questions: where did you have it done,
which constellation is that, how was it that you were in
the Arizona desert wanting to mark your body?

It is then Lestine, older than you by twenty-five years
drops her panties and shows you an arc of stars
shimmering over her Venus mons. Willie Mae gasps.

Lestine says: Mother of two, you’ve seen woman parts before.

She will tell you about a mean streak of time
under an angry star, when she was laid up in a crack
house. how she did it for some man who’s dead already;

Only of this is she certain. Hearing the ruckus,
Mama and Willie Mae’s daughter, Rochelle will walk in
to see you and Lestine thusly bare assed.

Willie Mae and Tiajuana pointing, laughing,
asking how Tiajuana stayed so skinny, how you got the
tits for the whole family, giggling like first love. Rochelle

will drop her pants and show the mark of sankofa on her hip
and you, Lestine, Mama and Willie Mae will chastise her.
She will protest, But Tanya and Lestine have

tattoos. Your mother will say it then:
But Tanya and Lestine are grown.
This will be the first you heard of it.

***

The brother is grown, stands guard over the twin boys and their
church clothes, watches the horizon from the steps. Rises.

The twins too, fidgeting, rubbing the back of their heads
where the brother thumped them, tired of all this waiting.

The father, fumbling a double, then a half Windsor knot
in his hands, strangling in the pollen from those damned
hothouse flowers, distracted by the space he gazes, rises.

Three sisters, laughing about pranks and seasons
in a room where entire childhoods, dresses and sugarbread
sandwiches were shared. That laughter, those bodies, all rising.

The daughter and the aunt, your mother chase after.

The grandmother, your grandmother they call Little Mama comes
behind, asks what’s taking so long? Puts her hand in the small
of your back, pushing you forward and upward.

You belong to these women all in their second marriages.
You belong to the brother and the man and the boys—

Squinting and blinking without recourse from the light.
Your bodies gleaming in space, burning figures,

constellation of mourning.