WEBVTT

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This next poem is
called "One in Three."

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"The room rang,
cavernous and noisy,

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even with most of the long,
wood plank tables emptying.

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I'd snagged a seat at the
granite topped bar and placed

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my order, pizza
margherita, a mere minute

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before the kitchen closed.

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The bartender
served the red wine

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in a simple juice glass,
unavoidably pretentious

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in a space so thick with
gentrification pricing

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and decor.

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Later, after my
plate was cleared,

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I looked up from the book
occupying me while I ate.

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The seats on either side
of me had also cleared,

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and the guy two
seats down, who'd

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been as deeply buried
between his headphones

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as I'd been between my
pages, had also surfaced.

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To my surprise, he asked
to see what I was reading.

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"What's this word," he
pointed, at the beginning

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of Jackie Wang's title--

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carceral capitalism.

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"It's about incarceration," I
offered as a starting point.

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"I've been in three
times," he returned.

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I looked at him as
he continued, playing

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with my glass and
the dregs of my wine,

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puzzling together the
dark glow of his skin,

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his hipster trim
mustache and goatee,

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his polite curiosity about my
plain little gray covered book,

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and his unacademic understanding
of the subject I was studying.

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If I was once
again surprised, it

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wasn't because I
didn't have the facts.

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Turning my bar stool
fully toward him,

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I tried threading the needle,
whose eye was circumscribed

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by my desires, to show
I knew the low down,

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but not downplay the
impact of his words.

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What is the proper
response to hearing

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a man tell you about the
pervasive racism of the guards?

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Of one whose bicep bore
a tat of a Black baby

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with a noose around its neck?

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To hearing him say that
prison don't do nothing

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but make you worse?

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I'd read it all before.

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Was his witness
backing up the books,

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or were the books
testifying to his life?

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I listened, shaking my
head and nodding along

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with his almost casual account
of insights so impossible

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to accept or deny.

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I know odds are
every third Black guy

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I meet has been slammed by a
system as criminal as anyone

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it claims the
right to prosecute.

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I know it.

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Still, my repeated "really?"

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"really?"

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in soft but steady counterpoint
to his impromptu riff

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was an amen.

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So it beat, attesting
to the evening's

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unpredicted revelation, the
printed statistic transmuted

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into body and blood."

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