Felon Read online

  to confess that he knew people like you.

  & you are free, you are what they call out

  & off papers & living in a state where you’re

  not disenfranchised. In prison, you listened

  to the ballot or the bullet & imagined that

  neither was for you, having failed with

  the pistol & expecting the ballot to be

  denied. But nah, you found free & in line

  notice that this is not like the first time

  you & the woman you’d marry got naked

  & sweated & moaned & funked up a room

  not belonging to either of you. That lady

  is with you now & a kid is in your arms,

  & you are wearing a Nat Turner T-shirt

  as if to make a statement at the family

  reunion. Everyone around you is Black,

  which is a thing you notice. & you know

  your first ballot will be cast for a man

  who has the swag that seems inherited.

  It’s early but there is no crust in your eyes.

  You wanted this moment like freedom.

  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. Sometimes, it’s just luck.

  Just having moved to the right state

  after the cell doors stop

  clanking behind you. The son

  in the arms of the man was mine,

  & the arms of the man belonged

  to me, & I wore that Nat Turner

  T-shirt like a fucking flag, brown

  against my brown skin.

  EXILE

  No letters distinguish my father’s name

  from my own. No signal for the mailman, the postman,

  my employer. The man before them is me

  & not what happens after grief. We are no goldfinch,

  instead a kind of crow, a murder of us looming.

  An employer searching our

  history would find felonies & divorce proceedings, the online

  account of our background a song of tragedy & regret.

  A public defender or prosecutor seeking our truth

  finds a dozen men with portions of our names, variations &

  fragments & records of men who’ve been called before

  a judge for everything from domestic violence to traffic tickets

  to something called jury trial prayer & everything I did

  that landed me in all those prison cells. There is no way

  to distinguish us without a birth date, as if our first breath

  is a signature separating who from who. In 1960,

  eight years before the King’s assassination sparked the torching

  of his city, my father was born; & twenty years later, just

  as crack would make my father’s home burn again, I arrived

  like that man’s shadow. The room fills with us, when

  I enter—our regrets our anchor, our history an echo that sounds

  when I speak, the decade I now

  own somehow more & more like the decades he has lost,

  though, in a way, I know this is the kind of thing he’d call

  . . .

  bullshit on & point out that there is nothing in the cracks

  & tremors & baselines of my voice that suggest the sixth-story

  window he leaped from as if to test the theory of man & flight

  & tattooed wings that I obsess over. & maybe he’s right,

  this unwieldy path of contrition or reform or mourning we

  both find ourselves walking has never been

  wide enough. Still, I come from a man who’s nursed

  more than whisky, meaning who’s nursed it all, from a pistol,

  to a prayer, to a small child in his arms that calls

  him daddy. Those revelations are the kind of story a man

  who only has his own name could never own.

  PARKING LOT

  A confession begins when I walk into a parking lot.

  Near empty, the darkness a kettle. The burner against

  My skin cold like any story that ends this way.

  The parking lot more of an opening than an opportunity.

  The man was waiting for home, asleep in a car after

  A working man’s day. Everything I know of home

  Is captured by the image of a man running from

  The police, his arms flailing unlike any bird you’d expect

  To fly. Walking into a parking lot begins a confession.

  The burner is a key & afterwards there will be no home

  To find. My boots echoed against the black of asphalt.

  Hours before I flashed the burner on that family, I kissed

  My kid goodnight. I told a woman that I loved her.

  But when has love ever been enough.

  PARKING LOT, TOO

  A confession began when I walked out of that parking lot.

  A confession began when I walked Black out of that parking lot.

  A confession began when I, without combing my hair, dressed

  For a day that would find me walking out of that parking lot.

  There is so much to be said of a Black man with unkempt hair:

  He meets the description of the suspect; suspect is running.

  I ran away from things far less frightening than the police.

  A confession began when I robed myself in black. A confession

  Began when I walked out of that parking lot wearing a black

  Hoodie. Things get exponentially worse when a hoodie is pulled

  Over my unkempt air. A confession began when I walked out

  Of that parking lot Black. A confession began when I walked

  Out of that parking lot a Negro. A confession begins when

  That nigga walked into the parking lot. A confession begins

  When that nigga & the pistol he carries like a dick walked

  Into that parking lot. A confession begins when everything you

  See him doing is seen as sex. A confession begins when

  That nigga walked into a parking lot & drove away with everything

  Belonging to that white man. A confession begins when

  My mother laid up with a man the complexion of that nigga’s

  Daddy. A confession begins when my mother births a child

  In a city close enough to make me & that nigga almost related.

  A confession begins when the police perceive us as one. We must

  Be one. He could not have walked in & driven out & I walked

  In & walked out on the same night & whatever gaps in the story

  & slight differences in the features of our faces was just

  More evidence that niggers will lie. A confession begins even if

  I didn’t have the fucking car. A confession begins, my confession

  Began, with a woman stitching stars and stripes into a flag.

  GOING BACK

  after M.M.

  If I return, it’ll start with a pistol

  & what happened

  last night, the dark a mask that

  never hides

  enough. I’ll pour the last of my

  drink down so fast,

  I’ll choke & cough & then

  think about a half dozen

  Black boys sitting on crates in

  what passed as woods

  around the way, just behind the

  landscape of apartments

  where Slim told us he had

  HIV. If I go back, I’ll

>   be thinking of him, and how he

  shot the clerk in the

  7-Eleven during that robbery, killing

  a man because

  he was dying. When Fat Boy

  learned Slim had that shit,

  as we called it back then,

  knowing no better than us,

  he wrapped

  Slim up in a brother’s

  embrace. It changed how I saw the

  world. If I return,

  the past that I pretend defines me

  will not explain the old

  feeling of cuffs that capture

  my hand’s ambition. A sheriff’s

  car will take me down I-95, &

  I’ll tell myself the first time

  I went down south was to go to

  prison. All of my legacy

  will be in my head, rattling

  around in that four-door sedan

  with the fucked-up suspension. I’ll

  ride through my memories,

  will feel time constraining my

  dreams. Returning will

  take me through what’ll feel like an

  entire state filled with cities

  named after prisons. My

  birthdays of yesterday will

  become the water that my head

  struggles to break

  through. & if I dared mourn &

  say a prayer, but

  nah, I wouldn’t mourn or say any

  prayers.

  IN CALIFORNIA

  TEMPTATION OF THE ROPE

  The link between us all

  is tragedy, & these so many years

  later, I am thinking of him,

  all of twenty & gay &, maybe, more

  free than any of us might ever be,

  & this is one way of telling the story,

  another one is aphorism, or threat:

  blood on my knife or blood on my dick;

  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.

  There is no reason for me to think of him

  now, especially with the football player’s

  hanging body eclipsing another prison

  cell, except, maybe the kid whose name

  I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered

  something the dead man’s singing legs could

  never, how not to abandon the body’s

  weight, & how to make the body expand,

  to balloon, to keep becoming, until even

  . . .

  the danger could not swallow you.

  One day I watched him, full of fear for

  my own fragility & wondered how he dared

  own so much of himself, openly. For all

  I know every minute in those cells

  was safe for the kid whose name

  I cannot recall. But how can a man ever

  be safe like that, when you are so

  beautiful the straight ones believe it &

  want to talk to you as if they love you

  & want you to dare them to believe

  that some things in this world must be

  too lovely to ever be broken.

  BALLAD OF THE GROUNDHOG

  —where cities get lost to time,

  everyone knows the groundhog’s story,

  a wild animal caged, a climb cleaved,

  the beast transformed into something gory,

  a caution or a flag or just inevitable.

  They say he almost flew, catapulted

  before the rest happened. Anviled

  by the metal fence, cast as freedom’s insult

  in this county where states still turn

  men into numbers. There’s no city

  where I can feel free. Time is fucking

  inconsolable is what I mean, a starved sea

  & sometimes there is nothing—just

  days & their ruthless abundance.

  By the time I heard the woodchuck’s

  tale, I’d been returning to prison as penance,

  circling black holes that turn the barren

  lands dense: avenues & alleyways

  buried inside sadness of castaways

  lost to the clink. Who prays

  for the groundhog? The Cut

  is a landscape of cells dug into red dirt—

  Who with a state number outruns

  the fate of red dirt? The rodent’s hurt?

  . . .

  I owe my ears a debt for this burden.

  The groundhog believed in

  escaping the steel bars around him.

  Home was gleaming metal, the linchpin

  of shackles & handcuffs. Who

  wants to awaken to that spring?

  When I ask my cousin, who knows

  more prisons than cities, he’s calling

  the Cut a fucking deathtrap, as if

  he knew the beast. The groundhog

  a legend & caution. & Janis Joplin might

  have been right, but for the epilogue:

  the marmot, small-eared rodent, lost

  everything; eclipsed, like all wild

  things aching for release. The fence

  tempted; one afternoon it exiled

  the wobbling-near-leaping thing

  with saw-teeth sure to haunt.

  A groundhog, rabid animal, any human

  entangled in razor wire, wants

  to be more. We all, when held

  that way, will struggle, twist the blades’

  edges deeper. & so shanked

  on a spiraling cosmos, the serenade

  . . .

  of the grass rat became a story

  we all know. When the fence’s tines

  grab hold, they will embrace like prison

  strangles anyone doing time—

  & this is true, whatever the

  groundhog’s fate. Maybe men ain’t

  as wild as we think. & no one

  came to cut the whistle-pig free.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1980

  I have called, in my wasted youth, the concrete slabs

  Of prison home. Awakened to guards keeping tabs

  On my breath. Bartered with every kind of madness,

  The state’s mandatory minimums & my own callus.

  I’ve never called a man father; & while sleep, twice

  Wrecked cars; drank whisky straight; nothing suffices—

  I fell in love with sons I wouldn’t give my name. Once

  Swam at midnight in the Atlantic’s violence,

  Under the water, rattling broke the silence. I cussed

  Men with fists like hambones & got beaten to dust.

  Buried memories in my gut that would fill a book.

  I’ve carried pistols but have never held a bullet.

  There is frightful little left for me to hold in fear,

  Definitely not the debt that threatens to hollow

  Me. I’ve abhorred transparency, confessed to so-and-so,

  But what of it matters, in this life so much has troubled,

  & the few things that didn’t, never failed to baffle.

  & EVEN WHEN THERE IS SOMETHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT

  There are those who fuck,

  whose bodies collapse into yearning.

  This is in the middle of all anger,

  the sweat glistening, the moans

  become something primal. The first

  time I felt like I owned something,

  she was moaning in my ear

  as if I was more animal than man.

  Caught in the precipice. She says,

  fuck me like we just met. & she means,

  like all of the shit that is ruining everything

  hasn’t happened, she means when we

  thought how we joined together

  augured some mythic kind of joy.

  & yes, this is the
fantasy, wanting

  to be wanted. She called me hers

  as if the state didn’t already have claim

  to most of me. So sincere, that kind

  of want, when talk verges on orgasm.

  But I was uncomfortable with my own

  hunger, & how it cascaded into

  this thing that left me empty & her wanting.

  MURAL FOR THE HEART

  Tonight is not for my woman, who would touch me

  before we speak; not when the accumulation

  of our yesterdays hang like the last dusk before us—

  each memory another haunting thing. Not when buried

  somewhere behind us is all that the past, that we,

  will not let die, history our prophecy & albatross, the myth

  we measure the marrow. Every story worth telling

  has a thousand beginnings. Let me tell you this one:

  There was this one night on a road trip. She, my wife, was not

  there. Already rehearsing my absence, practicing the dance

  of raising boys alone. Distance our disaster. & so, if I say

  the trouble began when the car stalled, I would be lying. But

  the car did stall, every light inside flashed as if

  the emergency was something breaking inside of she & I,

  & not just an empty tank. Everyone wants a chance

  to be a hero, & so, when I climbed out the truck’s front seat,

  already I had measured the distance from the truck to the station.

  A thousand feet. I once lifted my woman & carried her

  on my back from where we stood to the bed that I would turn

  into what remains when lies become shrapnel. Have you seen

  a man push his body against a thing as if love alone

  would move it? That night there were three of us riding. My