This next poem is called "One in Three."
"The room rang, cavernous and noisy,
even with most of the long, wood plank tables emptying.
I'd snagged a seat at the granite topped bar and placed
my order, pizza margherita, a mere minute
before the kitchen closed.
The bartender served the red wine
in a simple juice glass, unavoidably pretentious
in a space so thick with gentrification pricing
and decor.
Later, after my plate was cleared,
I looked up from the book occupying me while I ate.
The seats on either side of me had also cleared,
and the guy two seats down, who'd
been as deeply buried between his headphones
as I'd been between my pages, had also surfaced.
To my surprise, he asked to see what I was reading.
"What's this word," he pointed, at the beginning
of Jackie Wang's title--
carceral capitalism.
"It's about incarceration," I offered as a starting point.
"I've been in three times," he returned.
I looked at him as he continued, playing
with my glass and the dregs of my wine,
puzzling together the dark glow of his skin,
his hipster trim mustache and goatee,
his polite curiosity about my plain little gray covered book,
and his unacademic understanding of the subject I was studying.
If I was once again surprised, it
wasn't because I didn't have the facts.
Turning my bar stool fully toward him,
I tried threading the needle, whose eye was circumscribed
by my desires, to show I knew the low down,
but not downplay the impact of his words.
What is the proper response to hearing
a man tell you about the pervasive racism of the guards?
Of one whose bicep bore a tat of a Black baby
with a noose around its neck?
To hearing him say that prison don't do nothing
but make you worse?
I'd read it all before.
Was his witness backing up the books,
or were the books testifying to his life?
I listened, shaking my head and nodding along
with his almost casual account of insights so impossible
to accept or deny.
I know odds are every third Black guy
I meet has been slammed by a system as criminal as anyone
it claims the right to prosecute.
I know it.
Still, my repeated "really?"
"really?"
in soft but steady counterpoint to his impromptu riff
was an amen.
So it beat, attesting to the evening's
unpredicted revelation, the printed statistic transmuted
into body and blood."