Weeks after her death I came to the garden window
to marvel at sudden pale feathers catching, scattering
past the rainy glass. I looked for magic everywhere.
Signs from the afterlife that I was, indeed, distinct.

Betts’s poems are about the complicated relationships between black men and freedom, between black men and love, and about how those black men—loved, unloved, murdered, freed—risk their lives for one another by attempting to see one another.