_______
Reginald Dwayne Betts
let me tell you bout the night i died
for Charles
shots
emptied
the block.
to the sound
of Junk Yard Band’s “go
hard.”
my blood,
sangria poured
on dry pavement.
you closed
your eyes
inhaled
bucked
on my funeral
never visited my
memorial
exhaled
and weed
smoke rose
in mourning
Misunderstood
My woman lays
in the bed
I’ve splintered,
on the mattress
I’ve taken
a hatchet to, opened
up the inside
until maggots
bled out
my hollowed eyes;
she shivers
because what
I say sounds too
close to the thud
of my Timbs
walking away,
with only a lit
Newport and fingers
warm from her flesh –
and if our child
hears this
in the womb,
he would still
only get
half this suicide
song, he wouldn’t
see me on my knees,
in the shadows
of a dark bathroom,
my neck and back
so straight
they become
the tombstone
I want to pray
myself from up under.
Soldier’s Song
His brim tilts, a razor blade
poised to cut his face in half.
He’s crumbled on the stoop
like a crushed pack of Newports,
an oak cane leans into the crook
of his right knee – shrapnel breaks
you down, he tells me. Seventeen years
in the service only to hit Iraq
like a stilled sledgehammer
and have steel scraps
turn my knee to a crimson mush.
Six empty corona bottles are lined
before his feet like dead soldiers
and all I can think to do is sit and riff
bout what Bush did to his knee,
but he pauses, stares toward the North Star
and tells me, I had a woman once.
My lady is in my car waiting,
and the engine’s hum says she feels ignored.
He says, I had a woman once
and left her to play god in some
foreign land. He tells me he never
wanted to make officer,
instead needing the blood to dance
like lies before his hands.
