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earlier, when Smith dedicates Homie to “the realest one / Phonetic One / Andrew Thomas.” Later, in “for Andrew,” originally published in The Rumpus, Smith delivers a eulogy-like poem for their departed friend. With anguish that equals that of Achilles, the Greek hero who fouled his face with mud and soot after the death of his most beloved Patroclus, Smith writes: “when you went i choked on dirt.” We are made witness to the most pointed of pains, wherein death robs a loved one too soon, and, along with the speaker, our very ability to speak. Smith is no stranger to death. Continuing in the concerns voiced in Don’t Call Us Dead, Smith latest book not only ruminates on brotherhood, but also on the body, its blood, its bruises, its breaking, and the brutality it bears, particularly when it is black and brown. Yet Smith’s body isn’t just under threat from bullets; their own HIV status brings deliberations on death and disease to the forefront of their profound poetics. In “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects” they write: there is no bad news yet. again. i wish i knew the nausea, its thick yell in the morning, pregnant proof that in you, life swells. i know i’m not a mother, but i know what it is to nurse a thing you want to kill & can’t. you learn to love it. yes. i love my sweet virus. it is my proof of life, my toxic angel, wasted utopia 118
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what makes my blood my blood. Smith’s language here is particularly striking, if not surprising, especially when they describe HIV as “a thing you want to kill.” Is not HIV the thing that wants to kill them? Their very inversion of the fatality of the virus also upends the disease’s power over Smith’s own self-love. Instead of robbing the poet of their own physiological agency, the “toxic angel” HIV, like the angel Gabriel gracefully arriving before Mary, tells Smith that something else lives inside them. But that does not make their blood any less their own; in the end, their body is still their body, still something holy, which Smith learns to celebrate. Perhaps loving the body, loving the self, is akin to friendship — learning to love another, even while we pray that bad news will not come. Again. In its cutting compassion, Homie is as much a celebration of loved ones’ lives as it is a lament for their loss, equally a war cry for kinship and the burial dirge after the battle. The collections rings as a heartfelt call to love our beloveds as if they’ll be gone tomorrow, because they just might be. Yet Smith teaches us that one thing is still certain for today: in our homies, despite our most harrowing of hurts, we can always find the hope of healing.
