by Tawanda Mulalu

I want to know why people choose to live:

whatever it means to say, let alone mean
a whisper like this, as if there is a choice
in any such thing as this, as if you chose that night
or more likely: a series of too complicated ruptures
of nerves castrated all desire you once
possessed to hold on to whatever it is
I still feel compelled to, to keep breathing. What air.
To breathe the late Austin night without you—
no: you would not have been here—but without you—
breathing the cool dark American early spring,
where I flew away to, away from the winter bleak
of New England. How dark was it in England

when your brain chose to—was made to—
vanish you. But to separate brain from
self… Today’s literalism resurrects Spirit as
“mental health.” A ghost of an idea of us.
Perhaps you chose against further withdrawals
from light: if you could not choose mood then
you chose lack of mood, forever. Perhaps
you loved yourself enough to die. Is melody real.
Is reality within a voice. But a voice is patterned
within air: and so must be real, like any particulate

happening to and from one another: so is not totally random: but is
too complicated in our feeling of it: and so must feel random, and so: is

brittle to our ears—unless reduced to its barest notes.
Is melody real. Asks my mirror. Again in the too early morning
now. It interrupts whatever poor singing I’ve made with the shower’s
fog. It imagines you there. Again in your hotel room. Imagines you
singing. Tenderly a last time. As years ago
tenderly we sang to one another—a little, but a little—
in my bedroom when we first met—or was it over voice notes,
phone calls—but a little, a little. I don’t remember.

What can I say of myself since America.
Since having not the desire, but the need for what
I have come to know as poetry was, is,
based on the belief that to sing was, is, to reify
life: life itself: to reify it against this indefinite
darkness that comes to know us from
within: your hands will vanish you. Your voice

insists itself. Breathe in to carry the song then
breathe out to hear it without you. After your body,
too complicated music: brittle to my ears, unending
unless reduced to its barest note. There is nothing
to forgive you for. I am still in possession of sunlight,
meandering dumb and bright through every window.
Do not imagine the hotel room where you last breathed had
windows. Do not imagine that that glass lengthens
your breath into something louder than what
is heard. A news site recites the room number.

We are in the room, cast and crew after a completed scene:

your cousin lifts the boom—its stretched foam hangs
shadows across us. You lie in bed, staring into the white
ceiling. I am cross-legged on carpet, fingering the white
sheets. Our camera imprisoned by tripod. Quiet now.
Record room tone. Our lungs, breathing
nothing; our tongues, singing nothing; our mouths, ululating
nothing; these sheets unrustling, uncomprehending;
the grey glare of the room’s actual windows, unwitnessing,
unimagined. Exit news sites with the same picture of you
from your Facebook. Translucent skin. Switch off the mic.

I saw your cousin after four years, in Gaborone, finally.

He had called me two years ago to tell me how
you happened to yourself. What I heard were the birds
from home, swallowing his voice. What I heard was
the sunlight behind him, the warmth it left all over
the Earth which remained during the first night I met you,
your hands above our faces in my bedroom, signaling
the motions of planets. You wanted to study astronomy.

Two years before your cousin called me, you called me.
Your family had moved to Sheffield. The day passes. Already
the stars start settling in my window. When I saw
your cousin, we laughed. Then we talked about you. Then
day passed. The stars passed. The news sites said you would
study geology. My first year in college, I switched from physics
to psychology. Your cousin’s laughter would vanish.
We would be talking. Then you’d come up—then room tone.

Listen. The earth sings, or the mind imagines the earth sings,
whatever. None of us survive that uncompromising sound. 

Poem copyright 2025 by Tawanda Mulalu. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Tawanda Mulalu on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Child,” “Dal Niente,” and “Libido” 

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt