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  • And Even the Living Are Lost
  • Jamaal May (bio)

Pigeons scrap over a crust of bread while feathersfall into filthy runoff water. The gutter spits themdown the throat of a sewer. The sewer gives us nothing,the curb at least returns dice. Today, it is meaninglessto look for your fist, there, shaking until the rattle of bonessounds like winning. You wanted to see clean watersomeday, eat sambussa in Ethiopia and fumblea foreign tongue. Now, in prison, you are as far awayfrom Dexter Avenue as you've ever been.

Yesterday your son pressed his nose to the screendoor to watch the gaggle of baseball caps crowd the sidewalk.The bones did what bones do.Streetlights buzzed with their particular sadness.

The last night of your last free summer, streetlightsadded a sickly orange glow to the shimmerof guns, slippery with sweat, so your son could seethe casual havoc of it all. That it wasn't you who finally pulledthe trigger did not stop the teeth of handcuffsfrom closing around your wrists. Your son watched the waya perched bird watches: quiet, flinching at slight sounds.

The dice game erupts, a bottle shatters, a door slams shutand the sound ricochets off pavement, scramblesinto the branches of the block's only tree before darting offlike some worried pigeon. Your son stares at us.How long has he been staring at us? [End Page 101]

Jamaal May

Jamaal May is the author of Hum (Alice James Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award, as well as two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine, 2009, and The Whetting of Teeth, 2012). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Blackbird, among other journals, anthologies, films, and broadcasts. A recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, and Callaloo, Jamaal is a graduate of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers and is the 2011-2013 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.

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