My wife says it’s a good thing humans don’t hold fear

in their skin the way dogs do
which I guess is easy to say while driving at
night through a neighborhood where the houses got
more rooms than the bodies inside them could
ever fill even after they have chewed the skin off of
another old black church & built a shopping
mall over its bones
but on the eastside of Columbus the
police ain’t been around since that new
year’s party where I learned
that you can tell the difference between
gunshots & fireworks by how fast your
mama pulls you back from the window
& begins to say another one of those
hushed prayers & on the eastside of Columbus
them boys flash headlights twice on
saturday nights to let the
women know to get the babies inside cuz
another one of the homies bled out behind
greenbrier on friday & now someone else’s son ain’t
gonna make it to church in the morning
& maybe their younger brothers will praise
the empty space in the bed
after all of the mourning has
peeled itself off of the project walls
& maybe boys will begin to
praise the bigger portions served
at the dinner table after
a body leaves & never returns
we from the hood after all
so maybe distance is a currency
when boys pile themselves on top
of their families & that is how a bed is
made for the night
it must be nice to have enough rooms
in a home to store things
so that you never have to make a rupture
of your own stomach & fill it with
all of the times you could have been
dragged through the glass-ridden
street choking on the name of
someone who could maybe save
you but will never come & there are
so many moments like these writhing
under the skin of black boys

you would think that we would
always be full & never hunger
for anything
& yet