WITNESS

According to America’s Most Wanted, “Around 3:00 a.m. on February 17, 2005, New York City transit workers found two suspicious bags alongside the track at the Nostrand Avenue station in Brooklyn.”

When Rashawn Brazell went missing,

the first trash bag of his body parts

hadn’t seen his head, didn’t know where

it could be. The subway tracks spat

no sparks for him; the stairway light

to the train flickered no S.O.S.;

the recycling plant uncoiled

no ribbon of six-pack plastic to offer

evidence, condolence. Workers

at the recycling plant found a morbid gift,

limbs bagged up like trash. No head

to say a name or claim his body scattered

like false clues across Brooklyn. A shovel

holds memory better than any mourner,

rain carrying the sweet sting of pine

in its translucent purse, bird shit

from a nearby headstone washed by a storm

to the ground; the shovel blade holds

it all—the tears and the grass and the rain’s

borrowed scent covers the dead

with a choir of things to hold. Song

in the mother mourning, mourning

what is left to hold, holding her one

long note, holding on to its impossible

fermata, to the throat’s quaking acreage,

to the diaphragm’s bellow; the note holds on

and won’t let go, is shaped by this holding,

and is changed by the woman it enters

and changes. Song is changed. She is changed.

And the city is lightless, O God so still.