The officer is kneeling on a man’s neck
with the full weight of functional eardrums.
When the audience begs for mercy,
when he knows it is thoroughly engrossed,
he shifts his weight a little, for effect,
makes eye contact and holds it—
what command he displays
of this inheritance.
Note the capacity for illusion,
how it seems
he sees the girl with the cell phone.
In truth though,
he’s lost in thought, wondering
with all the sickness in the air,
if wintering in Windermere
is the thing to do this year.
And nothing less than that failure of faith
could move him to linger so long
at this fleshly altar —
so profound was his contrition,
he could not rise
until he had made sacrifice.
He makes a balance beam
of panicked blood,
demands a silent desecration,
but put a man on his face
before God long enough,
and he is bound to cry out
for his maker.
Cedric Tillman holds a BA in English from UNC Charlotte and graduated from American University’s Creative Writing MFA program. Cedric’s poems appear in several journals and anthologies including RHINO, Pleiades, Barzakh Magazine, Rove, The Manhattanville Review, Apogee Magazine of High Point University, Iodine Poetry Journal, Kakalak, and Home Is Where: an anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. His debut collection, Lilies In The Valley, was published by Willow Books in 2013. His latest offering, In My Feelins, was published by WordTech in 2019. He currently lives in northern Virginia.
