Letter for Tamir Rice’s 17th Birthday

June 25 2019
for the 2019 Volume Summer Poetry Institute
and all the Black teens at the Neutral Zone teen center, Ann Arbor, MI

I’ll be honest: when I learn it is your seventeenth
birthday the first thing I want is to be
where you are. Instead I go to teach a dozen teens
who you could have been among. I wish you here
at the teen center, picking out a slice of pizza
while Kyndall and Noran sing “Un-break
my Heart” in the kitchen; you here kicking
my ass in Smash Bros. while Ciatta stops in
on her lunch break from her summer job;
you here crouched at the woo-woo-ass altar
Molly set for us to add to, you reach into
your pocket to place something between a crystal
and the photo of Frida Kahlo, your hand lifts
from your pocket and no one flinches; you here
in the poetry room sitting next to Faye
while they write their elegy for Alton (I want
to wish you here while Faye has no elegy
to write, but to ask at once for two of us back
feels like too big an ask); we sing you
happy birthday and Molly gifts you
a huge-ass sunflower. I try to imagine each scene
until I realize I don’t know your 17-year old face.
And who am I to wish you back
here while still, just outside, there is the world
that could have let you live, but didn’t—
that removed you like a weed.

How can I love these teens so
when tomorrow they could be
holding your hand. When
there was an active shooter scare
on campus, Aldo had to hide
in a university building basement—
I do not want to tell you
where my mind went when
I got the text. I only know
one way out of this world
not made for us, but who am I
to desire the cup you
were forced to drink.

If, where you are, there is still time and space, if
you can see us, I hope you have not felt again
each bullet at each new slaughter. I hope
that, there, death is just one petal on the largest
sunflower, that no one fixates on the final photos
of you at 12 because it’s not all they have left.
How great would it be: if by the time I get there
you’ve been able to bloom
so much I don’t recognize even recognize you.