Reginald Dwayne Betts - Felon: Poems

ALSO BY REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS Poetry Bastards of the Reagan Era Shahid Reads His Own Palm Memoir A Question of Freedom FELON POEMS REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Cover art by Titus Kaphar, excerpt from a body of work entitled The Jerome Project. kapharstudio.com Copyright 2019 by Reginald Dwayne Betts All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. W. W.

Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Jacket design by Sarahmay Wilkinson Jacket art by Titus Kaphar, excerpt from a body of work entitled The Jerome Project. kapharstudio.com Book design by JAM Design Production manager: Beth Steidle The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Betts, Reginald Dwayne, 1980 author. Title: Felon : poems / Reginald Dwayne Betts. Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W. W.

Norton & Company, Inc., [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019026008 | ISBN 9780393652147 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393652154 (epub) Classification: LCC PS3602.E826 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026008 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W.

FELON Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison; Explains Occams razor: youre still a suspect after prison. FELON Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison; Explains Occams razor: youre 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 isnt the measure thats why its prisons vastness your eyes reflect after prison. My lover dont 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 wont reject after prison. The state murdered Kalief with a single high bail. Always innocent. Did he fear times effect after prison? Dear Warden, my time been served, let me go, Promise that some of this I wont recollectafter 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 slangs architect after prison. The Printer silkscreens a world onto black paper.

With ink, Erik reveals what we neglect after prison. My homeboy say hes 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 its over. Told em straight up, aint nothing to resurrect after prison. You have come so far, Beloved, & for what, another song? Then sing.

Shahid youre loved, not shipwrecked, after prison.

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 Id 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. & in a different place, I might have wept. & in a different place, I might have wept.

Said, once, my father lived with us & then he didnt & 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 Boones 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 cant hear straight.

Years later, another friend wondered why I named my son after my father. You know, thats a thing turn your life to a prayer that no dead man gonna answer.

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 hours 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 hes never known. When they name mass incarceration, he will be amongst the number, & the victims mother, her Black invisible against the subtext of her sons coffin, will be on the outside of advocacy. has folded his wings into his body & though he needs flight, now, there are only years to fulfill his need for escape. 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 hed make such a beautiful corpse.

Half what they say about what theyll do with the ratchet is a lie. The weight of death, worn so near a mans crotch, cant 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 aint prophecy, & aint none of us expect to be in the NFL or a cell. The truth somewhere between. Like when me, Thomas, and Sams 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 aint deserve the grave no more than his killer earned those 78 years. But that dont make the prison they turned into the killers 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 wed become felons. All the stories I keep to myself tell how violence broke & made me, turned me into a man cant forget the face of a young boy bleeding out as if his blood would make the scorched asphalt grow something loved, & beautiful.

When I was sweating & telling that woman my bad, sorry, please dont go. Id drunk a world of whisky. I couldnt 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. Aint 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 aint answer.