When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

in the backseat, my sons laugh & tussle,

far from Tamir’s age, adorned with his

complexion & cadence, & already warned

about toy pistols, though my rhetoric

ain’t about fear, but dislike—about

how guns have haunted me since I first gripped

a pistol; I think of Tamir, twice-blink

& confront my weeping’s inadequacy, how

some loss invents the geometry that baffles.

The Second Amendment—cold, cruel,

a constitutional violence, a ruthless

thing worrying me still, should be it predicts

the heft in my hand, arm sag, burdened by

what I bear: My bare arms collaged

with wings as if hope alone can bring

back a buried child. A child, a toy gun,

a blue shield’s rapid rapid rabid shit. This

is how misery sounds: my boys

playing in the backseat juxtaposed against

a twelve-year-old’s murder playing

in my head. My tongue cleaves to the roof

of my mouth, my right hand has forgotten.

This is the brick & mortar of the America

that murdered Tamir & may stalk the laughter

in my backseat. I am a father driving

his Black sons to school & the death

of a Black boy rides shotgun & this

could be a funeral procession, the death

a silent thing in the air, unmentioned—

because mentioning death invites taboo:

if you touch my sons the blood washed

away from the concrete must, at some

point, belong to you, & not just to you, to

the artifice of justice that is draped like a blue

g-d around your shoulders, the badge that

justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo:

the thing that says freedom is a murderer’s body

mangled & disrupted by my constitutional

rights come to burden, because the killer’s mind

refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity,

his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence,

with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when

my boys first reached for me. This world best

invite more than story of the children bleeding

on crisp falls days, Tamir’s death must be more

than warning about recklessness & abandoned

justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is

why I hate it all, the protests & their counters,

the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies

of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces

humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are



not permitted to articulate the reasons we might

yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon

sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood?

But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir

& I am bound to be haunted by the strength

that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist

the temptation to turn everything they see

into a grave & make home the series of cells

that so many brothers already call their tomb.