Explore Poems: Crime & Punishment

Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What's…

If I were an early person
I'd look for the limits of human wisdom
by going to sacred oak trees
or the local…

I want to begin this poem with two stories:
1. In 1984, my mother was pulled over for speeding in a rural, still unnamed village in Taishan. The cop was a forty-year-old man who let her go because of her age...

He was jailed for cruelty to insects, and his agent wasn’t answering the phone, so he stayed awake in the cell all night, pictures jumping around his head of the cops and the blowdryer they took as evidence. He used...

Six times every day we stand at the thresholds
of our cells to be counted, to be matched against
the roster of mugs the guards clutch and riffle
like assembly instructions as they tramp the ranges,
always in twos, keys piggy-bank chanking,
at night waggling...

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

The brutality of those two men
                                                 who broke into her apartment
and murdered her boyfriend,
       ...

Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s
bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
and science has proven what it had to prove:
every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
where prayer...

I come from the kidnapped,
                                    the assaulted—
my country’tis of reparations as in-store credit
                     ...

O transient voyager of heaven!
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ O silent sign of winter skies!
What adverse wind thy sail has driven
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ To dungeons where a prisoner lies?

Methinks the hands that shut the sun
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠So sternly from this morning's brow
Might still their rebel task have done
⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠ And checked a thing...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

melting glaciers      
                       frighten me when      
appearing on      
my street as      
downpours      
a feeling I send      
                     ...

And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. Asia Graves looks straight ahead as she calmly recalls the night a man paid $200 on a Boston...

the card machine is broken again.

on the platform, a boy
jumps the turnstile behind me.

i notice him, walking toward the tracks
with no look back.
some days the turnstiles swing forward,
and i don’t look back.
some days by the emergency exit a hand on...

"I seen it lots of times, I seen it, just from being
on the street when something new was going down; 
I seen kids get killed, a few, my buddy Jules
got bucked, this gang he was down with, I mean he
wasn't even...

When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes.
I can think of no softer warning for the mothers
who sit doubled before my desk,
knotting their smooth brown hands, 
and begging, fix my boy, fix my boy.
Here's his high school picture.
And the smirking,...

He was an open book. An opening book. That had just been opened up somewhat wider. By sorrow. And-by us. By all of us, black and white, who had so recently mass-inhabited him. He had not, it seemed, gone unaffected...

Lights, camera, action!

Cue George Floyd
crying for his Black mother
for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

8 minutes and 46 seconds
Kumbaya Mummah

George Floyd’s Black life belonged to Derek Chauvin;
he took it because it was his to take.
in Amerikkka Black life is police property
Black...

Probably one of those understated pieces. Simple silver. No ring
of  laurels surrounding an emperor or an eagle

catching prey in its claws. No hours marked
by birthstones. I like to believe he cared

about showing his worth through the transitive properties
of the world....