On A Rainy Afternoon

By Dick Altman

I could pretend I'm white, my light-skinned son tells me, as I try to teach him
how to deal with police.
--Drawn from The New York Times

Downstairs from my West Side walk-up, as if yesterday,
an officer asks, This the one?  She looks at the black,
tailored and corporate…shakes her head no.

I remember her telling me how, as she put key to lock,
she felt something cold on her neck.   Don’t turn 
around, the muffled voice said.  What could she do?

A mugging, a glimpse of raincoat, no word of color.
Suspect pulled off street—God knows what
he's thinking—on a rainy afternoon in New York City.

He stands there as if he weren't there.  Did a mother's
voice, I think back, echo in his silence?  Mahogany’s 
beauty signaled that day something else. 

I recognize him from playing tennis up in Harlem.
He keeps his eyes down.  Fifty blocks south,
Seventy-Third off Park plays a different game.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Gravel, The Offbeat, Split Rock Review, Almagre Review, The RavensPerch, Sky Island Journal and others.