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,