I featured a poem titled “Chicago (Keef)” by Kevin Coval last year. It is from his chapbook “More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like.” Today, I’m featuring another poem from the collection. It’s called “We Real” and is inspired by one of my favorite poets (of all time) Gwendolyn Brooks.

WE REAL
The Glory Boys on house arrest

we real. we
steel. we
still here. we
no fear. we
know school lame. we
dope game. we
know gangs. we
Jeff Forte kids. we
jail birds. we
broke, bitch. we
capitalists. we
jupiter gassed. we
murdered fast. we
unseen we
wanting we
something we
more than one thing. we
eastside. we
southside. we
westside. we
on the block, we
high noon. you ravinia picnic and air condition. we
fire hydrant & fire, cracker. we
hot hell in June. you nap noon. you spoon. we
rap. we
die, soon

Tapwater Coffee
by Diane Hamill Metzger

They took away our coffee pots;
You know the type:
Big forty-cup, with chrome,
Black plastic spigot and feet;
The kind you’d never use at home.
They said a weapon
Potentially lurked there,
Were it heaved or water thrown.
Now in the land of synthetic dreams,
Of cup-a-soup and instant tea,
Another compromise
Slips in to burden me.
I may suck the caffeine
Of paper packets and sleepless nights
And write endless narratives
Of wasted years and trampled rights,
But, try as I may, as I burn midnight oil,
And heat up my verses and curse my toil,
My thirst is room temperature –
My water won’t boil.
Ah, what emotional masturbation
Brews in the grounds of this pleasure dome;
Drinking tapwater coffee.
And thinking of home.

Diane Hamill Metzger has been serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania and Delaware state prisons since 1975. She is a widely published creative writer.

by Alixa Garcia (Arise for Assata Project)

For Assata
New Brunswick Prison, 1977

In this new picture your smile has been to war
you are almost obscured by other faces
on the pages
those shadows are sisters
who have not yet spoken
your face is in shadow
obscured by the half-dark
by the thick bars running across your eyes
like sentinels
all the baby fat has been burned away
like a luxury your body let go
reluctantly
the corners of your mouth turn down
I cannot look into your eyes
who are all those others
behind you
the shadows are growing lighter
and more confusing.

I dream of your freedom
as my victory
and the victory of all dark women
who forego the vanities of silence
who war and weep
sometimes against our selves
in each other
rather than our enemies
falsehoods
Assata my sister warrior
Joan of Arc and Yaa Asantewa
embrace
at the back of your cell.

by Audre Lorde

I Have Seen You
by Lolita Lebron

I have seen you as I searched
in the shade
of this terrifying and cold silence.
Some furniture falls to pieces…
and I’m left with the cell,
bereft of warmth and humor.
Everything is so alone. So disquieting.
Love has gone so far away from my eyes…
And there is no chirping from the birds
to make me smile away my sorrow…
“I am trembling, companero,
with painful and exhausting uneasiness!”
My shoulders hurt…as if sinking under
the weight of tortured rock,
The hour is dark.
The day silent with a moan
hidden in its great burden.
Even prayer is wounding: in the depths of my entrails
pain tearlessly weeps.
I like forests and gardens.
The waterfalls and their tiny crabs,
their rocks,
their murmurs and bubbles,
their radiant streams,
the thought of their mysteries,
with flowers and plants surrounding them.
Their aromas.
And how I loved the washerwomen,
scrubbing upon the rocks
with a box of bluing at their side.
How they remind me of mama!
Here, jail is like a tempest,
heavy and hard-hearted…
A ruin that reeks of death
and unspeakable pain.
It is the white bear’s domain.
Keys and blows, headcounts,
injustices and schemes.
Undisclosed tortures
from an unwritable book.
The real story of death,
unwritten, without pages.

Visit
by Alicia Partnoy

On Fridays Mama breaks through
the locks and gates
to play ring-around-the-rosy with you,
counting the minutes.
Papa, from far away
in his walled-in day,
dreams of your warm skin
and your numbered minutes.
If I could, dear child,
explain to you the reason
for all the locks,
for all the gates,
for all the bars,
for the high walls,
for all…all
the numbered minutes…
My child, if I could
devour space
and play ring-around-the-rosy
far from every prison…
oh we’d be playing free
and my hands
would lose all track of time…

Conundrum
by Carl Clark

I am my prison;
Encapsuled in my biases,
Caught up in my fevers,
Tightly bound by my loves

And holding all who love me
(I entrapped them with honeyed
words and dollars hung on weeks.)

Leave while you can
Before the ties grow too tight.
I cannot free you.
I am inside myself.

The Bullet, in Its Hunger
by Ross Gay

The bullet, in its hunger, craves the womb
of the body. The warm thrum there. Begs always
release from the chilly, dumb chamber.
Look at this one whose glee
of escape was outshone only by the heavens
above him. The night’s even-keeled
breath. All things thus far dreams from
his cramped bunker. But now
the world. Let me be a ravenous diamond
in it, he thinks, chewing through the milky jawbone
of this handsome seventeen-year-old. Of course
he would love to nestle amidst the brain’s
scintillating catacombs (which, only for the boy’s dumb luck,
slipped away) but this will do. The bullet does
not, as the boy goes into shock, or as his best friend
stutters, palming the fluid wound, want to know the nature
of the conflict, nor the sound of the shooter’s
mother in prayer, nor the shot child’s future harmonies:
the tracheotomy’s muffled wheeze
threaded through the pencil’s whisper as the boy scrawls I’m
scared. No.
the bullet, like you, simply craves
the warmth of the body. Like you, only wants
to die in someone’s arms.

The Lovesong of Emmett Till
by Anthony Walton

More than likely she was Irish
or Italian, a sweet child who knew him
only as a shy clown.
Colleen, Jenny or Marie, she
probably didn’t even know
he had her picture,
that he had traded her cousin
for baseball cards or a pocketknife,
that her routine visage
sat smoldering in his wallet
beyond any price.
He carried his love
like a burden, and devotion
always has to tell.
Hell, he was just flirting
with that lady in the store,
he already had his wife
woman back up in Chicago.
He wasn’t greedy, just showing
off, showing the rustics
how it was done. He had an eye,
all right, and he was free
with it, he knew they loved it.
Hey baby, was all he said,
and he meant it as a compliment,
when he said it in Chicago
the white girls laughed.
So when they came to get
him,he thought it was
a joke, he proclaimed himself guilty
of love, he showed them
the picture and paid the price of
not innocence, but affection, affection
for a little black-haired, blue-eyed
girl who must by now be an older
woman in Chicago, a woman
who will never know
she was to die for, that he died
refusing to take back her name,
his right to claim he loved her.

Frosting
by Langston Hughes

Freedom
Is just frosting
On somebody else’s
Cake –
And so must be
Till we
Learn how to
Bake

There are days, I admit, when work and life threaten to overwhelm…

It’s difficult to live in Chicago during this historical moment without succumbing to perpetual rage. Some days are defined by an internal battle between righteous anger and impotent rage.

Our mayor was away on a ski trip when the city announced its decision to close 54 schools. This is the largest mass closing of schools in the country’s history. It comes on the heels of Mayor Emanuel closing several mental health clinics in mostly black & brown communities. All of this is happening in a larger context where poverty has been steadily increasing in Chicago, affordable housing is scarce, communities are demanding access to trauma care and we have had a spate of lethal violence. We seem to have entered an era of disaster capitalism in Chicago where the elites manufacture crises as an excuse to privatize the commons.

In light of what feels like an onslaught of negativity, exploitation and oppression, it would be understandable to throw up one’s hands and decide to give up the fight for social justice. However, for me, this is impossible because I am privileged to engage with people (young and old) who believe passionately in our capacity to change our circumstances. These individuals refuse to abandon a generation of young people to the vagaries of capitalism and the punishing state. I am lucky. They give me hope.

Last week, a journalism student named Leah Varjacques who works with the Chicago Bureau interviewed me, Ethan Ucker (co-founder of Circles & Ciphers) and some young men from the Circles & Ciphers program about restorative justice. She just sent me the video and I was reminded again about why the work that I am blessed to participate in is such an important antidote to the current orchestrated assault that we are experiencing in this city. We are not a city of marauding, murderous black and brown people who need the National Guard to impose order on our “lawless” neighborhoods. We are not lazy, pathetic moochers who are bankrupting the coffers of the city. There is resilience, love, and hope in Chicago.

I hope that you will take 5 minutes to watch the video and be reminded that resistance exists and that it will continue.

restoring hope from Leah Varjacques on Vimeo.

[Special note: Those who know me will recognize that I appear on camera in this video. This is not something that I like to do and I avoid this at all costs. However, I feel so strongly that the good work that we are doing in Chicago needs to have a broader platform that I sucked it up this time.]