Tally
By Taylor Johnson
I am convinced
that every time a Black child is born,
A tally is taken somewhere unseen.
Numbers shift.
Charts adjust.
A quiet arithmetic of futures already decided.
Before first words,
before first steps
A life is measured in projections.
How many beds,
How many bars,
How many bodies
will be needed to sustain Progress
eighteen years from now.
All spoken softly
under the promise of reform.
But I have seen what that word becomes
once it hardens into walls.
Watched it wear the faces of families—
Dear cousins, dead cousin—
passing through corridors that do not return
what they take.
County lines.
State lines.
Country borders.
Steel doors that close louder
than any prayer.
And inside, time does not heal.
Outside, time does not wait—
it erodes.
Names thin into numbers,
voices flatten into echoes,
men, women, children folded into spaces
too small to hold their full selves.
They call it correction.
But nothing there is corrected.
Only contained.
Only consumed.
Because some systems
are not built to change you—
Only to decide
How much of you
is allowed to remain.