PERSON Poem: Lock and Key, by Samina Hadi-Tabassum

He was holding the lock in his hand
My little brother only three years old
Grasping the obtuse metallic object
In his cold clammy fingers, raptor like

At the bottom of the living room stairs
I watched over him that weeknight
While my mother worked in the factory
Leaving me alone to take care of him

I knew it was past his bedtime, so dark
But I still needed to finish homework
Math problems swirling in my head
Stooped under the lamp with a pencil

I looked up suddenly, sensing his milky smell
There he was smiling and giggling, coming closer
My baby brother’s voice an ascending arpeggio
Mumbling gibberish sounds in broken chords

What happened next was a visceral appeal
For attention I suppose and for being possessed
My baby brother’s episodes of controlled chaos
His inner child devolving into murk at midnight

My disbelieving eyes relive the terror of that night
As my imp brother hurls the metal lock at my face
Crushing my bottom teeth and opening a wound
At the bottom of my chin, blood running all over

My shrill cries, heaving sonorities into our house
Ignored by my father hammering away heavy snores
Alarmed I run into the kitchen to grab a clean towel
Pressing it hard against the newfound cave in my chin

There was a numinous quality to the cuts on my face
Peering into the cavity of my mouth, I see the missing teeth
The mountainous looking mouth now had lost its peaks
As if appearing without my intentionality, an apt symbol

My baby brother, the improviser, does not register
The precision of the wound, like a marked Christ
Our overlapping cries assembling into one ragged line
A mini-opera with piercing sounds of dissonance, manifested

And the result is disconcerting–a rough-edged gash erupting
On my face, still today–the hangar like space of my mouth now closed in
The margins shrinking, a visual reminder of my youth, an analogue
Fueled by a memory of my adolescent self, of forced womanhood

An inferiority complex induced by a childhood accident
My brother my gemini twin and I torn but stitched back
Together, bloodshed as balm for a life of poverty
An absent working mother and a complicit fallen father