Cuco
who or what takes out the trash / for he
consumes neglect in three course meals /
children kidnapped in garbage
bags / totem pole’d around this city /
what is their crying but
the color of his face / living
inside everybody who left
what used to be home / in his
swagger, the absence of
graciousness / bones in the mouth
of a stray / neglected scraps
of Crown Fried Chicken / time
is only measured in snow / shooting
up bad behavior like crystalline
needles / liquid heat to fibered tissue / muscle
made metal in heat / clipped to hips
at intersections / parents bark his name to
progeny / attempting to keep darkness
out of a child’s face / because
darkness is his area code / he is
the unzipping of jeans / money
bands / the sounds of snapping
twigs inside a firearm’s
chamber / he is real
every time another
is lost to these
streets / he is real
because children.
Dimitri Reyes is a Puerto-Vegan poet, educator, organizer, and YouTuber from Newark, New Jersey. He is the recipient of the SLICE Magazine’s 2017 Bridging the Gap Award for Emerging Poets and a finalist for the 2017 Arcturus Poetry Prize by the Chicago Review of Books. Dimitri received his MFA from Rutgers University- Newark and his poetry is published in Entropy, Obsidian, Acentos, Anomaly, Kweli, and others. You can find him expanding the poetry community at http://youtube.com/c/dimitrireyespoet.