The Lord Might Have Given Him Wings

There was something
wrong with him,
our poor thing shouldering
this inevitable.
America’s hell & everything
after this hour’s confession.
The officer’s eponymous
blue, their shields & silences
& walls, drown
the living.
If prison is where black
men go to become
Lazarus (or to become Jonas),
this kid must
already have wings.
Because they will bury
him there. (& 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 abandon, all of them:
fathers & democracy, friends, hope, mothers)
his history a cataclysm
of the guns he pulled
& the dirt shrouded dead
teenagers. When they name mass
incarceration, he will be amongst
the number, but 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 satisfy
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 would believe
he’d make such a beautiful corpse



Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of the collection of poems Bastards of the Reagan Era and two other books.