Peter Newon
Exit Wound
Funnily enough, I saw my first dead body a block south of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. Atlanta, Georgia, August ‘95. We were headed home from dinner and the cops must have just showed up on scene a few minutes beforehand. One of them barked “Keep it movin'” as we rubbernecked past.
It was dusk. Late summer’s sticky air clung to the black man’s body. Shot, I guess. Cabbagetown was a neighborhood known for drugs and gangs, but also some of the best barbecue south of I-20. If you didn’t belong there, you best not hang around.
I couldn’t see any blood around the body but the way the man’s right foot was balanced against the pavement stands out in my memory—on the tip of his white high-top. Air Jordans, with its iconic logo—the silhouette of a man in flight. And here it was emblazoned on the ankle of this dead man. A moment captured in some cartoon of a man having fallen face first. Or, like it belonged to a statue on a war monument. A pose you don’t hold willingly. Not a single reflex left inside.
train car tags such deliberate acts
About the Author
Peter Newton is the author of several books in the Japanese short form traditions of haiku, haibun, and tan renga. His most recent collection of haibun is Part-Time Gods (Snapshot Press, 2022). His newest book of haibun and haiku, a room inside the rain, was recently published by Red Moon Press.