white

'Love is a dead man walking," is a line from a freewrite by Devon Howard, 18,

written in one of my writing workshops earlier this year.

Love is a dead man walking

My students are writing about love

And I know nothing and everything of it tonight

I stand in the street and my body isn’t

molded into the texture that the hands of the police

And the white man crave cold

This skin is smooth on surface

Though it knows how to bleed

In ways that most days I know only

How to apologize for 

but At least

I can write my own poems about destruction

At least

No one is stealing my story from me tonight

Love is a dead man walking

and my feet couldn't sleep for weeks

Young men in a classroom that I stand in front of

Ask me to critique their poems

but My mouth is glued to white concrete

And a history that I know too well because the people who wrote it look like me

People listen to me

Stop listening to me

love is a dead man walking

even that is a line that I stole

to try and make sense of my own silence

I am angry

I am ANGRY

I am a womyn in july

And I am angry

Body, turn yourself invisible because you’re making too much noise now, you see

Contrast

makes the empty parts of my stomach wish to swallow themselves whole tonight

My father taught me to protest the wars abroad

I fight with him about our prisons

He is a good man

I know he, too, is living in this transparent cage

Of masculinity that teaches us to

cheer each time we send men to live behind bars

We call it justice sometimes

Upon acquittal we call it mistake

But It is all a mistake,

Built of the most intentional color scheme

it is on purpose

The gun didn’t mean to find its way to fingers

Fingers to trigger

trigger to bodybag and the empty heart of a grieving father

Mistake

I know you didn’t mean to kill him

I know you didn’t mean to listen each time you heard black and they said danger

Danger

Danger

 love

Is a dead man walking

dead men cannot walk, though

dead men cannot walk

dead men cannot walk

when they are buried as children

boys who are still children

boys who know what death tastes

like simply by observation

Each boy on my street is waiting

To try and make amends with a god

That I do not believe in

Spare him

Remember that he has a mother

Remember that the most evil among us want him to die

Remember that all of us let him die

that most dead boys who look like him never make the news

Love is a dead man walking but

He is easier to hold when he is alive

Hold him

Heal us,

love