Thank you, Angel.
Thank everyone affiliated with the Poetry Center.
On July 3, 1976, I had a son.
He was beautiful, curly hair, always laughing.
I was a young person, though.
I was a young mother.
I kind of figured out what I wanted to do.
But I didn't know anything.
I still wanted to party.
I still wanted to you know?
It's like I wanted to be a mother, but I wanted to be--
I think it was--
I'm think I had probably just turned 20.
And I was my son's friend.
We kind of grew up together.
And my connection to the project is my son.
Every once in a while, police would show up at my door.
And they would ask him questions about somebody
else, a friend of his.
And he would talk to them.
But when you have a young Black child,
you have to know that anyone outside of your family who
talks to him has a plan.
And there was a plan for my son.
So a couple of pieces, that was sort
of my strongest connection.
And I wound up interviewing my son because there
was so much that I didn't know.
And so a couple of the pieces are about him.
But the phone rings sometimes.
I have to decide to answer the phone.
When I click to pick it up, this is the way it goes.
There's that blip of echoed air.
And I say, hello, hello, before his new mama,
disembodied, white female, middle American, all-purpose
monotone, informs me I have a collect call
from an inmate of the Middlesex House of Corrections.
In the silence left open for his name, my son
barks, Damon, gravel and guttural and studied bad ass.
And, oh, I realize blind walking into what
now passes for ritual, it's just my son again.
His cage gracelessly unlatched, so
that he can mumble temporarily reach into other air
and tell me that his cellmate plans to kill him in his sleep.
Then I'm just another drooped mama in a ceaseless snaking
line, summoning my cinematic coup.
Lately, it seems the child is always, always
about to be murdered.
Only seconds later, I'm being treated
to a blow-by-blow chronicle of the shaving of his head
and the sloppy gouge when the distracted barber's razor dug
deep.
And, mama, there was blood everywhere.
But it look all right now.
Wait till you see.
I'm bald headed.
In the next breath, I'm scared, mama.
I'm sick.
I cough all night.
Then, as if he hadn't just swift whispered that weakness,
he shifts to a sputter of jailhouse legalese bringing me
up to date on his creaky version of hope.
And since I never been in jail before
and since I've been staying out of trouble in here
and since I've been doing everything they
say and since it wasn't my gun--
but does it matter what grace the system grants
if he's eating well or wrong, if the sentences run together
or on top of one another, if he's crazy about his mama?
Because when dark drops and my son can no longer fight sleep,
a man, savagely focused, will arc over him hefting a sock
swollen with dead D batteries.
Again, because of the dozens of times
he swears it's about to happen, I've
become an expert at envisioning my son's already nicked skull
collapsing and slick with itself.
200 miles away, I wince, gamely where his wound.
Two.
There's a picture of Damon snapped over
20 years ago when he was two.
It's black and white, just one unkempt moment
in the life of a kid, a snap only
a mother craving an unburdened memory could love.
His gray sweatsuit is caked with grime,
his crown impossibly kinked.
Staring at the phone--
staring at the photo, I long to plunge my hands
into those raucous snaps, kiss his nose,
and scoop his resisting wriggle into my arms,
to snort that rusty meld of sugar and funk.
A voice interrupts, ma, ma.
It is 20 years later again.
I should have never picked up the phone.
Three.
I can get in my car and drive toward him filling three
highway hours with Motown's begging
men, brown liquor, Aretha songs, and those damned
insistent pictures of my boy the way
he used to be, deadpan jokester, giggling game cracker,
stupefied by rockets and girls.
Then, without mercy, he spouts upward, dons cavernous denims,
stows away screw top wine, and morphs
into OG cocked cannon, baby maker, rhyme buster,
lemming, lemming, lemming.
The last picture, the one of him I hate the most,
stays with me the longest.
There's the grasping whiner who really needs canteen money
but never thanks me for raising his four-year-old daughter.
He's the single syllable grunt, head scarred,
grossly swollen from prison workouts,
who I avoid mentioning to friends whose sons are waving
grad school acceptance letters or touring
France with their jazz bands.
The most I will let on, he's in Boston on his own.
I don't say he's locked up.
But the phone rings sometimes.
Four.
The waiting rooms are always too hot.
I don't lift my eyes often.
But when I do, I see faces that mirror my own.
Our whole bodies sigh.
We are in sweatshirts and jeans, graying hair
pulled back, eyes straight ahead, waiting for our sons
on the fresh air side of bulletproof glass.
A buzzer sounds.
And a door slides open for their strained parade.
They shuffle as if shackled by boredom, plump and sinew,
suave in jumpsuits the color of storm.
They are missing molars, sunken bellies, downcast gaze,
gang love scorched into biceps.
Numbed and innocent, numbed and guilty,
they stream in, scanning the drab room for mama or bae
or my dear or maybe somebody, anybody from the block,
somebody who remembers them free.
Like toddlers, they hug awkwardly, check out
who else has come to see who else,
slyly size up their tribe, and greedily
eye the vending machines broken and bulging with poisons.
I scour faces, wonder if my son's homicidal cellmate
has allowed him dawn.
And then there he is.
Damon, damn him, serves up that grin guaranteed
to slap my heart open.
He sputters a few words.
See how big my arms are getting?
Then shuts to a silence, waiting for mama to come through,
mutter a flimsy bandage, make it all better.
Looking down the long sorrowful row,
I see that expectant hush repeated, repeated.
All those mothers wanting desperately
to be there but wishing they hadn't come.
If only we'd stayed home listening
to the phone ring and ring and not picking up,
we could just keep staring out at our own jails
into an unbending dark wallowing in blue and waiting for the sun
to rise.