"The years that we've lost"

Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Blood History

The things that abandon you get remembered different.
As precise as the English language can be, with words
like penultimate & perseverate, there is not a combination
of sounds that describe only that leaving. Once,
drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I’d 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.
But he said longing. & in a different place, I might
have wept. Said, once, my father lived with us & then he
didn’t & 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 Boone’s 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 can’t
hear straight. Years later, another friend wondered why
I named my son after my father. You know, that’s a thing
turn your life to a prayer that no dead man gonna answer.

______________________________________________

For a Bail Denied
          for A.S.

I won’t tell you how it ended, &
his mother won’t, either, but beside
me she stood & some things neither

of us could know, & now, all is lost;
lost is all in what came after—the kid,
& we should call him kid, call him a

child, his face smooth & without history
of a razor, he shuffled—ghostly—into
court, & let’s just call it a cauldron, &

admit his nappy head made him blacker
than whatever pistol he’d held,
whatever solitary awaited; the prosecutor’s

bald head was black or brown (but
when has brown not been akin to Black
here? to abyss?) & does it matter,

Black lives, when all he said of Black
boys was that they kill?—the child beside
his mother & his mother beside me &

I am not his father, just a public
defender, near starving, here, where the
state turns men, women, children into

numbers, seeking something more useful
than a guilty plea & this boy beside
me’s withering, on the brink of life &

broken, & it’s all possible, because the
judge spoke & the kid says
—I did it I mean I did it I mean Jesus—

someone wailed & the boy’s mother yells:
This ain’t justice. You can’t throw my son
into that fucking ocean. She meant jail.

& we was powerless to stop it.
& too damn tired to be beautiful.

______________________________________________

Essay on Reentry

At two a.m., without enough spirits
spilling into my liver to know
to keep my mouth shut, my youngest
learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell,
a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky,
but History: I robbed a man. This, months
before he would drop bucket after bucket
on opposing players, the entire bedraggled
bunch five & six & he leaping as if
every lay-up erases something. That’s how
I saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating
presence recompense for the pen. My father
has never seen me play ball is part of this.
My oldest knew, told of my crimes by
a stranger. Tell me we aren’t running
towards failure is what I want to ask my sons,
but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off
to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest
despite him seeming more lucid than me,
just reflects cartoons back from his eyes.
So when he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know
what’s happening is some straggling angel,
lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his
duty, lending words to this kid who crawls
into my arms, wanting, more than stories
of my prison, the sleep that he fought while
I held court at a bar with men who knew
that when the drinking was done,
the drinking wouldn’t make the stories
we brought home any easier to tell.