Reginald Dwayne Betts

in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t like, not what I fear, because sometimes I think of  Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping all another insignificance, all another way to avoid saying what should be said: the Second Amendment is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance that says my arms should be heavy with the weight of a pistol when forced to confront death like this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play in the backseat while the video of  Tamir dying plays in my head,& for everything I do know, the thing I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar of poetry, the moment when a black father drives his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death of a black boy that the father cannot mention, because to mention the death is to invite discussion of  taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson that touches the concrete must belong, at some point, to you, the police officer who justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets because his mind would not accept the narrative of  your child’s dignity, of  his right to life, of  his humanity, and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed; the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding on crisp fall days;& this is why I hate it all, the people around me, the black people who march, the white people who cheer, the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of   humanity that we erase in this American dance around death, as we are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood, and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away, the memories,& that I could abandon all talk of making it right & justice. But my mind 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 of my brothers already call their tomb.

The link between us all is tragedy, & these so many years later, I am thinking about him, all of twenty & gay & 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 say that surviving that young & beautiful and willing to walk every day as if wearing sequins meant believing that there is always something 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 and want you to dare them to believe some things in this world must be far too lovely to ever be broken.

Some people say prison is the country where life is cheaper than anywhere else

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers, green roses, chrysanthemums, lilies: retrophilia, philocaly, philomath, sarcophilous—all this love, of the past, of beauty, of knowledge, of flesh; this is catalogue & counter: philalethist, negrophile, neophile. A negro man walks down the street, taps Newport out against a brick wall & stares at you. Love that: lygophilia, lithophilous. Be amongst stones, amongst darkness. We are glass house. Philopornist, philotechnical. Why not worship the demimonde? Love that—a corner room, whatever is not there, all the clutter you keep secret. Palaeophile, ornithophilous: you, antiquarian, pollinated by birds. All this a way to dream green rose petals on the bed you love; petrophilous, stigmatophilia: live near rocks, tattoo hurt; for you topophilia: what place do you love? All these words for love (for you), all these ways to say believe in symphily, to say let us live near each other.

Knots like two dozen fists swayed with want from the boy’s kaffiyeh, that black and white scarf with its useless hands clopping against the wind in protest against this boy and his somebody lost, against their own swaying in a dance the lost body has lost. A boy. A somebody lost. A body bodied in the lights of inauguration night when every light in the city flared with hope. Always losing, always a boy left with a dozen weights, small circles on strings pulling his head down to the ground. Downcast. Drop your bucket here and make the city yours and all that jive keeps him from running. Escaping the pavement, where bodies finally fall to rest. The kaffiyeh keeps him from bucking against the wind, hurtling himself to the Grey- hound or Amtrak or I -95 with a book bag and hitched finger. His head shrouded in the black and white, the knots keeping his eyes down as he traverses neighborhoods with names like 3rd World, with names like a nation falling. And the coffin-voiced boy is who god tells us he will save, and so those swinging knots must be a kind of redemption, a way to see the bullets that bury you, constantly, as if death is the disguise hiding your wings.

Everything measured. A man twists a tuft of your hair out for no reason other than you are naked before him and he is bored with nakedness. Moments before he was weighing your gallbladder, and then he was staring at the empty space where your lungs were. Even dead, we still say you are an organ donor, as if something other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician, nothing that suggests that a woman loved you until you died. From the time your body was carted before him to the time your dead body is being sent to the coffin, every pound is accounted for, except 21 grams. The man is a praying man and has figured what it means. He says this is the soul, finally, after the breath has gone. The soul: less than $4,000 worth of crack—21 grams— all that moves you through this world.