Reginald Dwayne Betts
Dear Augusta,
Your walls never surrender,
call out names or
recognize the sound of bodies
thumping against years as a mother’s
slatted prayer. If you mourn for the innocent,
straightjacket swaddled in a padded
room, mourn, too, for the young
man, a jackal screaming inside his head.
Augusta, you know Marquette
and how years multiplied
as tattoos along his arms, along
his back, and how a judge declared
the parking lot will fill with trees
before he breathes again.
You know Quincy,
namesake of the man who first sold
his mother a casket of dreams
under a buck-knifed moon. You know
Los, Adrian, Tariq.
One afternoon Rashad
broke the collar of midnight,
streaks of a Norfolk street
running down
his face.
Ahmad called his cell home,
called it his hut. Your
walls became the breastbone
he laid his head upon, the darkness
behind his eyelids. Under
a weather-worn staircase, he
shaped the handle of a plunger
into a reason for men cowed
by screams to look another
direction, to seek out the wind.
Dear Augusta, what do
names mean? You
know Universal, Moe-Moe,
Jake –all juveniles when they grilled
the camera for a photo ID, when you
gave them this language
of survival and blood.
Love in the Time of Chain-Link Fences
I watched. There was a chain-link fence, a
tear falling from her face. The echo of a car
door slamming. It was Saturday. Believe me
when I tell you I fell in love. Not with her, but
with her tears. It was a Saturday & the sun
was a fat globe in the sky. I’d been staring
at it, trying to fix my eyes, when she pulled
into the parking lot. The driver’s side door
slammed my fantasies into a question mark.
Dave’s sister. She visited twice a month. Her
hair the color of the back of my hand. I dreamed
about her for weeks & wrote her letters.
She cried when she walked to the car an hour
after walking in, ashamed at her brother in
chains. I wanted her to be ashamed of me.