Elegy Ending with a Cell Door Closing

Author(s): Reginald Dwayne Betts

Source: New England Review (1990-), Vol. 31, No. 4 (2010), p. 157
Published by: Middlebury College Publications
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27920416
Accessed: 08-04-2021 21:10 UTC

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Elegy Ending with a Cell Door Closing

& the judge told him to count

the trees in the parking lot
where there were only cars. Zero.
The same number of stars
you could see on a night in the city.
& the judge told him the parking lot will
be filled with trees, oaks & spruces
& pines & willow trees & grass & maybe
horses before he smells Richmond
on a Sunday afternoon; & another word
for this story is azalea, the purple bouquet
his mother buried her face against,
her skin another purplish bruise?
he was guilty, & in the courtroom
he washed his hands against the air,
as if to say fuck everything;
imagine, there wasn't hair on his face
that afternoon Sc he'd never held a razor,
except if it was wet & inside
his mouth, the best weapon a man
could ask for unless you were the loser
in the first fight he'd see in prison,
a baseball bat turning the razor under
the bad man's tongue into a kind of prayer?
made the man wash the air with his hands,
too, & then everyone knew the washing
was a kind of suicide, & everyone knew
there would never be trees in that parking lot?
that the chubby kid who a whole
neighborhood called Fats would lose
every memory he's had in the wildfire of his
mind folding itself around a real loss.

Reginald Dwayne Betts 15 7

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