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Carp Poem After I have parked below the spray paint caked in
the granite grooves of the Fredrick Douglass Middle School
sign where men and women sized children loiter like
shadows draped in the outsized denim, jerseys, bangles,
braids, and boots that mean I am no longer young, after I have made
my way to the New Orleans Parish Jail down the block where the black prison guard wearing the same
weariness my prison guard father wears buzzes me in, I follow his pistol and shield along each
corridor trying not to look at the black men boxed and bunked around me until I reach the tiny classroom where two dozen
black boys are dressed in jumpsuits orange as the pond full of
carp I saw once in Japan, so many fat snaggle-toothed fish ganged in and
lurching for food that a lightweight tourist could have crossed the
pond on their backs so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread to
drop into the water below his footsteps which I’m thinking is how
Jesus must have walked on the lake that day, the crackers and wafer
crumbs falling from the folds of his robe, and how maybe it was
the one fish so hungry it leapt up his sleeve that he later
miraculously changed into a narrow loaf of bread, something that could
stick to a believer’s ribs, and don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer too, in
the power of food at least, having seen a footbridge of carp packed gill to
gill, packed tighter than a room of boy prisoners waiting to talk
poetry with a young black poet, packed so close they might have eaten each other
had there been nothing else to eat. **
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