On Tuesday, I watched as a 27-year-old man
held an electric toothbrush in his hand.
His fingers fumbled a bit at the switch,
but he flipped it, then sat astounded
as the dry brush shimmied and jumped in his palm.
This run on batteries?, he asked,
turning it upside down,
his eyes lit with a toddler’s wonder.
Perhaps you see nothing amazing in this.
But let me paint a picture of this man.
His chest is impossibly plumped, thick and rigid,
his skin mapped with stretch marks
where the muscle has exploded beneath.
His shaved head, a field of grizzle and sweet spray,
is peppered with gouges where the blade sensed
his blood and slipped. He is a child of single syllables,
grunts just under the radar:
I need to eat.
I’m real tired.
Think it’s gon’ rain.
I like that shirt.
He is my
son, crafted of fevers unleashed and jailhouse iron.
And now, with the clear beyond cry, I see
that his punishment was never there,
among the scabbed tattoos, sluggish clocks, open toilets.
His sentence began in the free, in that moment
when he turned a cheap chugging red toothbrush
over and over in his huge hands and said,
Look at this, Ma. Wow, look at this.