found toys

George Wilkerson

person of color didn’t exist 
back then, so black-skinned 
Brandon imagined me 
as light-skinned. i’m half-white, 
half-Korean, and no black 
in the projects would play with me 
without it turning into a fight until 
him. we’d fought three times the 
day i moved in. now we played 
around the dumpsters, 
stashed a boneyard of broken 
bikes and scooters 
behind his crib 
next to woods where crack dealers 
and smokers ran up and down 
hidden paths. we imagined ourselves 
as Doctors Frankenstein 
(neither of us Igor) 
creating rideable monsters. 
a six-inch scooter tire 
on the front wheel
of a mountain bike 
taught us that 
to keep the crick out of our necks 
from uneven riding, we had to pop 
and ride wheelies nonstop, prove 
that being different was possible.

the fugitive factory

George Wilkerson

i. it was black and white, but . . . 

in the projects police, 
pronounced PŌ-leece, 
didn’t make skin distinctions: 
if you lived in the projects

police saw you as a menace to society. 
the one time i phoned police 
was the night my dad tried to kill me. 
haloed from behind in blue and red light

police escorted me home, reassuring me, 
“You must’ve done something to deserve it,” 
then pressed me toward my dad’s predatory grin. 
police were boogeymen,

scary characters with supernatural powers to make 
adults and children disappear. i heard parents threaten 
bratty children with them: a’ight, keep on — po-leece 
gone take you lil ass to jail. 

that was in response to a four-year-old throwing 
a tantrum in the cereal aisle. allegedly, 
police embodied THE LAW. reams of nasty oral 
folklore about THE LAW — run-ins with them,

running from them, getting captured 
by them — were near the heart of culture 
in the projects, a perpetual crime scene. 
but was there so much crime, really,

because our very way of life was against the law 
or because of the widespread conviction 
THE LAW was against us? or was it 
a vicious feedback loop where first-causes are moot,

where we were products 
of a legal ecosystem 
that itself was a product 
of us? 

ii. muscle memory

indoors, watching kung fu flicks 
we practiced karate kicks on each other 
dreaming of being ninjas. but outdoors 
in the projects we watched police 

kick the shit out of neighbors they arrested. 
so we practiced dodging THE LAW, dreaming 
of keeping our freedom, in tact. we learned fast 
                                                        to scatter 
on instinct when police cruised past— 
they’d screech to a stop, hop out to chase us 
on foot like an advanced form of Tag.
police were always it and rarely caught us

unprepared on home turf, if outdoors, 
as we owned all the cuts and corners, 
felt the hidden 
paths hardwired in our skinny calves. 

iii. breakers

THE LAW 
symbolized combat boots stepping on necks, 
prison bars and heartless guards swinging black batons 
that tried to break all that came into contact — 

teeth, cheek bones, jaws, even 
spirits. we bragged in awed tones 
about dads, uncles, older brothers who had fought 
THE LAW for minutes before going down 

or broke away and was on the lam. 
you got respect for that, 
you got street cred. in the projects 
THE LAW acted 

as a broken force of nature: 
like combining gravity and inertia 
THE LAW failed 
to nail us down 

because it kept us moving round and round