Felon Read online

  FELON

  POEMS

  REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS

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  To Terese, Micah, and Miles:

  for love; for the many moments I cherish, and every regret; for all of it.

  CONTENTS

  Ghazal

  Blood History

  The Lord Might Have Given Him Wings

  Behind Yellow Tape

  Losing Her

  Whisky for Breakfast

  For a Bail Denied

  Triptych

  When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

  In Alabama

  A Man Drops a Coat on the Sidewalk and Almost Falls into the Arms of Another

  City of the Moon

  Diesel Therapy

  If Absence Was the Source of Silence

  Essay on Reentry

  In Houston

  Night

  Essay on Reentry

  Essay on Reentry

  On Voting for Barack Obama in a Nat Turner T-Shirt

  Exile

  Parking Lot

  Parking Lot, Too

  Going Back

  In California

  Temptation of the Rope

  Ballad of the Groundhog

  November 5, 1980

  & Even When There Is Something to Complain About

  Mural for the Heart

  Essay on Reentry

  Confession

  In Missouri

  House of Unending

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  FELON

  GHAZAL

  Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison;

  Explains Occam’s razor: you’re still a suspect after prison.

  Titus Kaphar painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar.

  He knows redaction is a dialect after prison.

  From inside a cell, the night sky isn’t the measure—

  that’s why it’s prison’s vastness your eyes reflect after prison.

  My lover don’t believe in my sadness. She says whisky,

  not time, is what left me wrecked after prison.

  Ruth, Papermaker, take these tattered gray sweats.

  Make paper of my bid: a past I won’t reject after prison.

  The state murdered Kalief with a single high bail.

  Always innocent. Did he fear time’s effect after prison?

  Dear Warden, my time been served, let me go,

  Promise that some of this I won’t recollect—after prison.

  My mother has died. My father, a brother & two cousins.

  There is no G-d; no reason to genuflect, after prison.

  Jeremy and Forest rejected the template, said for

  it to be funky, the font must redact after prison.

  . . .

  He came home saying righteous, coochie, & jive turkey.

  All them lost years, his slang’s architect after prison.

  The Printer silkscreens a world onto black paper.

  With ink, Erik reveals what we neglect after prison.

  My homeboy say he’s done with all that prison shit.

  His wife & baby girl gave him love to protect after prison.

  Them fools say you can become anything when it’s over.

  Told ’em straight up, ain’t nothing to resurrect after prison.

  You have come so far, Beloved, & for what, another song?

  Then sing. Shahid you’re loved, not shipwrecked, after prison.

  BLOOD HISTORY

  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. Once,

  drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if

  I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have

  dismissed him in the way that youngins dismiss it all:

  a shrug, sarcasm, a jab to his stomach, laughter.

  But he said longing. & in a different place, I might

  have wept. Said, once, my father lived with us & then he

  didn’t & it fucked me up so much I never thought about

  his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only

  now speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm & Mad

  Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no

  word for father where he comes from, not like we know it.

  There, the word father is the same as the word for listen.

  The blunts we passed around let us forget our

  tongues. Not that much though. But what if the old

  head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t

  hear straight. Years later, another friend wondered why

  I named my son after my father. You know, that’s a thing

  turn your life to a prayer that no dead man gonna answer.

  THE LORD MIGHT HAVE GIVEN HIM WINGS

  There was something

  wrong with him,

  our poor thing.

  & if prison is where Black

  men go to become

  Lazarus (or to become Jonah),

  this kid must

  already have wings.

  They call it inevitable,

  everything

  after that hour’s confession:

  The silences & walls that drown

  the living.

  (& what of his victims,

  their skin as dark as the night?)

  No one calls him

  kid. The arms

  he slides in a sweater (for

  protection against

  . . .

  the cold) slender enough

  to fit in the fist

  of a large man

  is what I mean. (His hands

  large enough to grip the black

  of the pistol, to squeeze the quiver

  of a trigger.) The holy

  have left, we know.

  & the kid, his halo

  a mess of hurt (the daffodils of poverty,

  & the ones who abandoned him),

  his sentence a cataclysm

  of the guns he pulled

  & the dirt shrouded dead

  teenagers in cities he’s

  never known. When they name mass

  incarceration, he will be

  amongst

  the number, & the victim’s mother,

  her Black invisible against

  the subtext of her son’s coffin,

  will be on the outside

  of advocacy. The kid

  . . .

  has folded his wings

  into his body & though he needs

  flight, now, there are only

  years to fulfill

  his need for escape. Shorn

  now & the corridors

  before him are as long

  as the Atlantic, each cell

  a wave threatening

  to coffle him. No

  one believed he’d

  make such a beautiful corpse.

  BEHIND YELLOW TAPE

  Half what they say about what they’ll do

  with the ratchet is a lie. The weight of death,

  worn so near a man’s crotch, can’t help

  but fuck with them. But who among us

  had a holster? Had been before a firing squad?

  None of us laughed when Burress shot himself,

  we knew a few who blew small holes in clothes,

  feet, sheetrock, while reckless with a burner

  off safety. That danger & prison should have

  made us pause. But, statistics ain’t prophecy,

 
& ain’t none of us expect to be in the NFL

  or a cell. The truth somewhere between.

  Like when me, Thomas, and Sam’s brother

  all beat the shit out of that boy with the lopsided

  edge-up. At first, it was a fair fight, & for real,

  Thomas just wanted to break it up. But the boy

  struck back & it became fuck it. Intervention

  turned intervening. Or like how I felt Slim ain’t

  deserve the grave no more than his killer earned

  those 78 years. But that don’t make the prison

  they turned into the killer’s tomb slavery.

  We all standing on the wrong side of choices.

  When we stomped & stomped & pummeled

  that boy, we carried massacre in our eyes.

  Half of all of this is about regret. A cage never

  followed my smacking the woman that I love. But

  for kicking a mud hole in that kid we’d become

  felons. All the stories I keep to myself tell how

  violence broke & made me, turned me into a man

  can’t forget the face of a young boy bleeding out

  as if his blood would make the scorched asphalt

  grow something loved, & beautiful.

  LOSING HER

  When I was sweating & telling that woman

  my bad, sorry, please don’t go. I’d drunk

  a world of whisky. I couldn’t sing if I wanted.

  G-d was throwing dice against my skull. I had lied

  to her for more days than Jesus spent in the wilderness.

  They say he was in the desert but I know

  the wilderness is worst. Ain’t no mirages in the wild,

  & with whisky flowing like gospel in my veins,

  I could hear her sit a shotgun by the door I once

  carried her through singing Real Love. Before I

  started banging on the door, I called her house phone,

  dialed numbers from a decade before things

  went digital. I been loving her so long. But she ain’t

  answer. That number from back when our love

  was three-way phone calls & laughter & hands

  that didn’t treat her body like a threat. Back then,

  she loved me in a way she don’t now & so I banged

  on that door as if I was the police & I started weeping

  & my body slumped—trying, but failing, to call her name.

  WHISKY FOR BREAKFAST

  My liver, awash in all but dregs

  of a charred oak cask,

  soaked in barley’s amber,

  shadowed as blood, dim

  as a cell in the hole, survived

  brackish prison water

  only to become collateral. The things

  that haunt me still,

  drown, now, friends say, in nearly

  fifty pounds of brick-

  hued rotgut. Spiritus frumenti.

  A gallon of whisky

  weighs eight pounds. & all this

  becomes a man confessing

  that he’s riven. & I drink.

  Mornings I turn sunrise into

  another empty glass & a

  dozen angels diving

  behind the mire I swallow to

  save my body from itself.

  All scream,

  me &, even, the cherubim, lost

  in that smoky, dense

  comfort, lost in darkness & sometimes,

  I swear,

  even G-d has no alibi.

  FOR A BAIL DENIED

  for A.S.

  I won’t tell you how it ended, &

  his mother won’t, either, but beside

  me she stood & some things neither

  of us could know, & now, all is lost;

  lost is all in what came after—the kid,

  & we should call him kid, call him a

  child, his face smooth & without history

  of a razor, he shuffled—ghostly—into

  court, & let’s just call it a cauldron, &

  admit his nappy head made him blacker

  than whatever pistol he’d held,

  whatever solitary awaited; the prosecutor’s

  bald head was black or brown (but

  when has brown not been akin to Black

  here? to abyss?) & does it matter,

  Black lives, when all he said of Black

  boys was that they kill?—the child beside

  his mother & his mother beside me &

  I am not his father, just a public

  defender, near starving, here, where the

  state turns men, women, children into

  . . .

  numbers, seeking something more useful

  than a guilty plea & this boy beside

  me’s withering, on the brink of life &

  broken, & it’s all possible, because the

  judge spoke & the kid says

  —I did it I mean I did it I mean Jesus—

  someone wailed & the boy’s mother yells:

  This ain’t justice. You can’t throw my son

  into that fucking ocean. She meant jail.

  & we was powerless to stop it.

  & too damn tired to be beautiful.

  TRIPTYCH

  But for is always game.

  A man can be murdered

  twice, but for science;

  his body a pool of blood

  in Baltimore & Tulsa,

  except, it isn’t, his body actually

  slender against the sunlight just

  outside a California prison. A crow

  rests on a fence near his car.

  Visiting hours long done

  (for man not crow,

  one of a murderous many

  that flies above this barbed wire),

  & the cigarette he smokes

  is illegal, here, & but for

  the magnetic pull tragedy

  has on Black women, he wouldn’t be

  here, right now, contemplating

  the crimson colored man leaping

  into the darkness on his J’s.

  He still says Air Jordans,

  because air is important,

  swearing to Black America’s

  aim, if not ability, to soar,

  a way to outrun statistics

  & the lead in the water.

  Alas, metaphysics says

  you are only you & no one

  else, & a Black poet says Black

  love is not one or one thousand

  things, & it all may be true,

  but for the fact that the man swears

  the crow looks at him dead

  as if he is already so,

  as if while standing there he

  has been murdered

  by his brother, murdered

  by a cop, & bodied

  by a prison sentence as flames

  from a Newport’s burning ash

  fail to illuminate his shadow.

  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.

  The Second Amendment—cold, cruel,

  a constitutional violence, a ruthless

  thing worrying me still; should be it predicts

  the heft in my hand, arm sag, burdened by

  what I bear: My bare arms collaged

  with wings as if hope alone can bring

  back a buried child. A child, a toy gun,

  a blue shield’s rapid rapid rabid shit. This

  is how misery sounds: my b
oys

  playing in the backseat juxtaposed against

  a twelve-year-old’s murder playing

  in my head. My tongue cleaves to the roof

  . . .

  of my mouth, my right hand has forgotten.

  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:

  the thing that says freedom is a murderer’s body

  mangled & disrupted by my constitutional

  rights come to burden, because the killer’s mind

  refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity,

  his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence,