A hushed dumb minute of our Lord last night.  Out to make change for my laundry at the Circle K,
I saw a man wrestled to the parking lot’s grit.  I’ve spat on that parking lot before.  He didn’t seem
too surprised as if he had tasted asphalt before, Mr. so and so, his thirty years shirtless and swearing,
a man the police dropped like a bag of ice.  Cuffed and curbed him.  A man trying to avoid the human
percussion of stares.

I was one of those people, bagged with a gallon of milk and dollar scratch-offs, returning slowly to a
life of Christian choreography: of work and good works; one who stared through police radio-rant, the
red and white light twirl, at the man, the fall you could see falling again.  As if he saw beyond the pick-up
trucks and people parade, the police out loud and out to prove there is order here; beyond the carved
smile of a stomach, arms sleeved with tattoos, the split-lip, the beautiful vocabulary of his body gone to
fever, to arrest.


CUE:  A Journal of Prose Poetry
Spring / Summer, 2005 Volume II, Issue 2