from Ángel García, Teeth Never Sleep
This is not you, but your body forced to feign prayer. A curbside confession: Forgive me officer, for I have sinned. On bended knees, arms raised, hands reaching for what little you know of god, you assume the position. Cruciform. Know what you have always assumed: you are just one breath away from breathlessness. This is not you, but your body made brilliant in orbs of blue and red light. This is not you but your body. Shrouded in Siren-call. This is not you but your body. . . .
Using visual imagery, these opening words of García’s prose poem, “Suspect,” merge a police stop with the act of Catholic confession, Christ’s crucifixion, prayer, and the Christ sacrificed, in Christian faith, for human sins. An odd, intriguing mash-up between the procedurals of police authority and the liturgy (public worship) and rituals of faith. García enacts a poetic transubstantiation: the suspect’s body transforms into the body of Christ. But the relation of power between the officer and the suspect also produces a transubstantiation, more secular, that alters the suspect’s humanity. The rituals of stop and frisk, or apprehension and arrest, turn the suspect from a thinking, sentient humanity into a mere body, physical structure, meat, or, if the worst happens, a corpse. Fortunately, the speaker can go on, and the end of the poem points toward a modest hope: “A bottle of glue in your pocket to teach your daughter that what’s broken can be mended.” Even so, this poem requires a nearly impossible faith to believe that the procedures, rituals, and power-relations that dehumanize us, and literally bring us to our knees, will ever be fixed so easily.
Ángel García, Teeth Never Sleep, University of Arkansas Press, 2018