Iain Haley Pollock


These and all else were to me the same as they are to you


When, on a city map,
the newspaper plotted
all the murders
during the first summer
I lived in Philly,
red dots eclipsed
      Point Breeze
and Kensington,
                                   seeped
         across Elmwood Park,
                                      Nicetown,
                                                                   Allegheny West.
               Red dots in a scatter chart
                                                                circled around
        the towers of Center City
                                                                        because the paper,
measuring in column inches,
                                   could not expend
                                                                        language
to keep pace
                         with the killing.
                                             Which is to say,
many Black boys
               died
that summer with not
                  a public whisper
of their names.
     Last week,
           an old colleague
wrote to say
one of my first students,
       a White boy
grown into a White man,
absorbed more opioids
than his body
could withstand,
             died cold and glassy eyed.
I have seen no hard fact,
           no record of this
with article and headline,
                                   not for days now.
If the same paper
plotted
                               this season’s fentanyl dead
                                                                           would dots
enshroud every city
                                   in Pennsylvania?
When I have said,
what about the Blacks boys,
                                         I have meant: when we could not
let ourselves hear
            as one child howled
                                     in the yawning desert,
                        when we left one child
bleeding in the street,
                                              we opened for any
                          mother’s child
                                   a possible world
of pinpoint pupils
                                   and lonely, sidewalk death.
                        When I have said,
what about the Black boys,
                                            I have meant: if we disregard
           the branch and fork
                                                             of any fissure,
   we leave all the grid
of the brick wall
                                                                 vulnerable to buckle.
                          When I have said,
what about the Black boys,
                                                       I have meant: if I do not stop
to answer—
         above the grinding din
                                                         of small choices and routine—   
my own question,
                                                                    I will be left with a red silence.

                                       I am left

                    with a red
            
silence.

      
                                   When I have said,
what about
     the Black boys—

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of the poetry collections Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018) and Spit Back a Boy (U. Georgia Press, 2011). His work has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America while also being nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He sits on the editorial board of Slapering Hol Press and the board of Tiger Bark Press. Pollock currently directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College and lives with his family in the Lower Hudson Valley.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023