Riot helmets outnumbered the protesters who, after Troy Davis was executed, stuck around to throw useless punches into the courthouse grass, while a woman near the forest of batons lay sprawled facedown in the lawn gripping a Bible, a green sea beginning to memorize the shape of her grief. If I say Death, cure death, and have such power over the scythe, how many cranes will it take to lift her out of this drowning? If I tell you white supremacist Lawrence Brewer was executed five hours earlier for the murder of James Byrd— if I ask you to look for birds foraging between his intricate tattoos, I don’t mean to distract you from the cross that still burned on his arm that day. I don’t expect you to stare into a graffiti of iron-crosses and spider webs scrawled across flesh and find a thrush vibrating with birdsong, but I want you to know why I listen for more than the cawing of crows: I wanted Brewer dead. So dead, my tongue swelled fat with hexes, so fat I wonder how forgive could ever fit inside my mouth. Somehow it’s always there, fluttering in the larynx of Ross Byrd—the man whose father was dragged, urine soaked, by Lawrence behind a truck. Watch him say it. Forgive. I swear, the word has feathers. I want to learn to get its wings between my teeth before more retribution blots out the sky. When I tell you glare flickered off a cop’s visor and startled a single crow away from the murder that flapped the sky into inky pieces, I want you to watch it close enough to notice its feathers aren’t black at all. Like bruises and ink, they are only this full-bodied purple—purple your eyes will still tell you is black the next time you see it spread out across sky. Watch it spread like the flush of pancuronium bromide into diaphragm, watch close enough to pinpoint when the muscles lock. If it is said the injection is humane, we mean to say this is humanity: no crack of rope, jerk of limb, no bloated face, clenched jaw, or reek rising twisted in smoke from a cooked torso— we mean to say there is nothing to disturb the nest between our ribs, there is nothing to make a heartbeat rumble like a murder of so many wings.
Jamaal May, The Sky, Now Black with Birds
