"A man walks out of a shop, notice he doesn't die": Roy McFarlane's "Rashan Charles, 2017" and Oscar Grant in "Fruitvale Station"

In "Rashan Charles, 2017", the last poem in the sequence "... they killed them" in Roy McFarlane's "The Healing Next Time", almost every prose stanza begins with the phrase "A man walks into a shop [...]". But the final section shifts: "A man walks out of a shop, notice he doesn't die" – followed by ordinary things Charles would have done if he hadn't died during an encounter with the police. I'm reminded of what I thought when Ryan Coogler's "Black Panther" was released with Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger: I wished Oscar Grant, the police-shooting victim Jordan played in Coogler's "Fruitvale Station", had survived to take his daughter to the movie. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 August 2021)

Michael B. Jordan and Ariana Neal as Oscar and Tatiana Grant in "Fruitvale Station".