Felon: Poems

The pistol you pressed against a stranger’s temple gave you that early morning. & now, boxes checked have become your North Star, fillip, catalyst to despair. Death by prison stretch. Tell me. What name for this thing that haunts, this thing we become.

The things that abandon you get remembered different. As precise as the English language can be, with words like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination of sounds that describe only that leaving.

& Nicky says it's a wonder how something that can have you hold another so gently could be the ruin of all you might touch.

A perfect day that's just like doom. Own so fucking world.

I keep praying my woman, who is no more mine than any woman can belong to a man, but is her own, constellation of music & desire, as is anyone, will forgive history, knowing a thousand angels stand beside, exhausted, too, though certain the heft of their wings will bring a gale fierce enough to lift this hurt that we refuse to name.

not when the accumulation of our yesterdays hang like the last dusk before us— each memory another haunting thing.

which is to confess: surviving that young & beautiful & willing to walk every day as if wearing sequins meant believing, always, there is a thing worth risking doom.

This is how misery sounds: my boys playing in the backseat juxtaposed against a twelve-year-old’s murder playing in my head.

WHEN I THINK OF TAMIR RICE WHILE DRIVING in the backseat my sons laugh & tussle, far from Tamir’s age, adorned with his complexion & cadence & already warned about toy pistols, though my rhetoric ain’t about fear, but dislike—about how guns have haunted me since I first gripped a pistol; I think of Tamir, twice-blink & confront my weeping’s inadequacy, how some loss invents the geometry that baffles.

You cast a ballot for a Black man in America while holding a Black baby. Name a dream more American than that, especially with your three felonies serving as beacons to alert anybody of your reckless ambition. That woman beside you is the kind of thing fools don’t even dream about in prison & she lets you hold your boy while voting, as if the voting makes you & him more free.

wishes the distance he traveled was something with him, & not the way he stole away from things he couldn’t handle.

A perfect day that’s just like doom. Own so fucking world. They lean into each other without touching. Horse has slowed down everything. High like that, you can walk for . . . hours, & imagine, always that there is a needle waiting for your veins. & Nicky says it’s a wonder how something that can have you hold another so gently could be the ruin of all you might touch.

refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity, his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence, with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when my boys first reached for me. This world best invite more than the story of the children bleeding on crisp fall days. Tamir’s death must be more . . . than warning about recklessness & abandoned justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is why I hate it all, the protests & their counters, the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood? But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many brothers already call their tomb.

This is the brick & mortar of the America that murdered Tamir & may stalk the laughter in my backseat. I am a father driving his Black sons to school & the death of a Black boy rides shotgun & this could be a funeral procession. The death a silent thing in the air, unmentioned— because mentioning death invites taboo: if you touch my sons the blood washed away from the concrete must, at some point, belong to you, & not just to you, to the artifice of justice that is draped like a blue g-d around your shoulders, the badge that justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo: