The Same Death Over and Over or Lullabies Are for Children

“It’s the small deaths in the supermarket” she said
trying to open my head
with her meat white cleaver
trying to tell me how
her pain met mine
halfway
between the smoking ruins in a black neighborhood of Los Angeles
and the bloody morning streets of child-killing New York.

Her poem reached like an arc across country and
“I’m trying to hear you” I said
roaring with my pain in a predawn city
where it is open season on black children
where my worst lullaby goes on over and over.
“I’m not fighting you” I said
“but it’s the small deaths in the gutter
that are unmaking us all
and the white cop who shot down 10-year-old Clifford Glover
did not fire because he saw a girl.”