The Night the Murderous Cop Was Not Charged
       

I lifted a cement block
on my dark and drunk
college town street
and almost put it through

the driver's side window
of a parked Oldsmobile.
I didn't know whose it was,
but this was suburban Indiana,

so probably some white
asshole, I reasoned.
Then again, I, too,
lived in suburban Indiana

and I, too, was
some white asshole.
It took the years
and the redwood forests.

It took the fog's slowness,
sage tea and the smells
of bay, eucalypt, loam.
It took distance,

the kind afforded me
by the state and its taxonomies
for what it thinks
of my body and being.

I'm trying to catalog
how I recovered
the softness I dropped
on those streets

like, yes, petals.
Years, airs, invisibilities
the likes of which
are unevenly distributed

like, yes, sleep.
I have wept often.
I have stood in a mass
of human bodies

not wholly unlike
an ocean or organism,
beast or bristlecone,
a many-minded star map.

But living bodies.
Not the ones ended
by the same current
that keeps me afloat.

I want to know where
all this weeping and standing
has taken us, exactly.
My white friends

are, mostly, slow evolvers.
Me too. That's the thing
I want to take apart
with a cement block,

my own unwillingness
to throw the block,
literally, whenever
I know where to aim it

to bring back future ghosts.
My own intolerance
for fire. For penance,
and purgation, and debt.

Does the infinite static
of the Pacific's evening tide—
everbearing, acidifying—
flicker itself towards justice?

Can the long memories
of the pines imagine
something like restitution
for all the blades, blights,

and wildfires we call
history? My guess is no.
Could be wrong.
I choose to believe

everything matters.
I don't understand how
we live here. We hardly do.
But there are foretastes.

We grieve together the night
the rapist was elected,
the morning the unarmed boy
was executed and half the country

couldn't be bothered,
the days of evictions
and vengeance,
the days of empire.

We grieve with our bodies.
On the dance floor
I've felt my footwork
was mourning.

On the city bus we grieve
poverty shoulder-to-shoulder.
I am growing penance
like a garden.

Can I tell you what I want
with regards to whiteness?
Do you know how
a burned forest regenerates?

There are certain kinds
of seeds, apparently,
that only germinate
in fire.

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Copyright © 2022 Michael Mlekoday All rights reserved
from All Earthly Bodies
University of Arkansas
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission