There was something about watching
a boy on the train platform pull a switchblade
on a smaller version of himself
that made me wonder what the lesson was.
When the smaller boy got rushed
and the crowd made room, I thought
for sure he caught the end of it
when he screamed like the boy he was, all of fifteen
in clean Nikes. The smaller boy was fast
and when there was no show of skin, no pooling proof
on the platform, even he said really
at the miracle of his unslashed coat.
It wasn’t that he could’ve been a student
in my class chewing on his pen before answering
my question about what Baldwin meant
when he said, One must say Yes
to life, and embrace it wherever it is found—
and it is found in terrible places, and another
student said after the cops shot his friend,
they handcuffed him and let him bleed out
on the sidewalk, another said she keeps a machete
behind her bedroom door when her mother is home.
How small I sounded when I told them to be careful.
How words can feel useless in a knife fight, how weak
I looked screaming stop with my back against the wall,
while an older man pushed the bigger boy back
at the smaller boy, saying, stop dancing and do it.