Abstract
For the City that Nearly Broke Me
A woman tattoos Malik’s name above her breast & talks about the conspiracy to destroy blacks. This is all a fancy way to say that someone kirked out, emptied five or six or seven shots into a still warm body. No indictment follows Malik’s death, follows smoke running from a fired pistol. An old quarrel: crimson against concrete & the officer’s gun still smoking. Someone says the people need to stand up, that the system’s a glass house falling on only a few heads. This & the stop snitching ads are the conundrum and damn all that blood. All those closed eyes imagining Malik’s killer forever coffled to a series of cells, & you almost believe them, you do, except the cognac in your hand is an old habit, a toast to friends buried before the daybreak of their old age. You know the truth of the talking, of the quarrels & how history lets the blamed go blameless for the blood that flows black in the street; you imagine there is a riot going on, & someone is tossing a trash can through Sal’s window calling that revolution, while behind us cell doors keep clanking closed, & Malik’s casket door clanks closed, & the bodies that roll off the block & into the prisons and into the ground, keep rolling, & no one will admit that this is the way America strangles itself.
I’m Learning Nothing This Night
The magazine on my lap talks about milk. Tells me that in America, every farmer lost money on every cow, every day of every month of the year. Imagine that? To wake up and know you’re digging yourself deeper into a hole you can’t see out of, even as your hands are wet with what feeds you. That’s how this thing is, holding on & losing a little each moment. I’m whispering an invented history to myself tonight—because letting go is the art of living fully in the world your body creates when you sleep. Say a prayer for the insomniacs. They hunger & demand the impossible. Pray for the farmers, hands deep in loam— body’s weight believing what the mind knows is ruin, they too want the impossible, so accustomed to the earth responding when they call.
“For the City that Nearly Broke Me,” copyright © 2015 by Reginald Dwayne Betts. From Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015). Reprinted with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved. “I’m Learning Nothing This Night,” copyright © 2016 by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.