My first tattoo as continued dying

by Farai Chaka

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The woman inking my skin said her sister died giving birth, and it was bewildering, the sway of trees afterwards. This earth

is all wind and bad seeds. I am lying down shirtless, dry, and to be touched by a stranger is still intimacy. I did, l promise, try

to want myself more, drink two cups less coffee each day, kiss my love and let my body do its faithful work. One pure way

I’ve been half forgiven is how she sits on a patch of window light in the foyer, holding a food magazine. I almost died. It’s all been slight

bursts of leaves since then. What l did want was to succumb to another sort of pain; wet nights weighed down by heated rooms, the white float

of a child’s balloon. One of the men l am descended from charged into a field straight, blue, right hand tragic and starved.

One night as a child in a clearing, bundled into softness, he watched what the claws

of a beast could perform as beauty on the beauty of another animal, suddenly called

to both fear and fear. Years later, his mother etched both his cheeks with two sharp slits, halfway tattoos, bled all his fear into it and like all true

wounds never stopped its common throb, a fork of pain from eye to lip. Anyway. I choose two short parallel lines for my chest, for that slip

of air between two solid points, for my life and death speeding side by side. I almost died. I was scared of how love looked at me, of the way the solid blue of a sky pried

from its own colour a washed red, like winter tomatoes, of drowning. My love constructed the nightmare from scratch, imagined me shouting,

though l did not, imagined the colour of water not as blue but heady clearness through which l could see the weight of my legs refusing the steady

pushes of swimming. I know everything is death. I love her, as then, as now, as the tattoo is almost done but somewhere else, l don’t know when,

the woman inking my skin inks it endlessly, scar after scar, and it is bewildering; my life as a series of endurances. Somewhere, this life is not so far, this life is endless sinking

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Farai Chaka is a writer from Harare, Zimbabwe. His work has been published in The Shore, Surging Tide, Ghost City Review and elsewhere. He enjoys long walks.