“A Different Route”
by Dwayne Betts
Last night I
took a different route
home, drove my Buick
towards a street I ran
as a child, a street that
outlasted my
wind
and held laughter and danger
like small lies. I turned
onto
that once shouted loose coins,
now dead on the right. Years
older,
beside the payphone, stood
the Popeyes, still rooted behind
a row of ever changing stores.
Safeway long gone,
my first kiss surrounded by
the black of its dirty gray and
red delivery truck, a memory.
I drove, passing three rows of
apartments
that housed my child-
hood, much has changed and still
I see myself shooting jumpers on a
crate suspended from the Old
Safeway’s
rear steps. None of us stayed. Not
Brandon, not Oatmeal, not Antwan…
all scattered, some in prison,
others in
colleges or
on other corners. This
night I looked for a clue, a reason
why so much was falling
apart and in the eyes of the few
children
there, out on a Friday afternoon,
I realized how consumed with the moment
we were. I drove until my vision
blurred,
until chasing an old memory placed
him there, speeding like nightfall
towards me in a stolen car, hands
twisting
the wheel, struggling to straighten
the tail, unable to straighten
about to…
and he vanished, left in ‘89
when it happened. His name another
forgotten
detail. I took a different route
home last night, visited old parts
of
myself. A lot has changed and I
failed
to find in the eyes of others the
thing
my wife, my children say has
turned
to stone in my own.