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

Who Failed, What Failed?
by “Brendan”

Society never failed.
They say it was all me.
After all, Isn’t that the reason the court calls me guilty?

It was not my family.
They’re trying to do what is best.
That’s why they turned me in, placed me under arrest.
And it was not the cops that bruised my wrists.
It was the cuffs clamped too tight, even though I did not resist.

And the shirt that was ripped as they threw me around
didn’t matter at all, because I was screwin’ around.
Was my family doing what was best when they smacked me
around because I fled school?

The teachers barely taught, and they never try to
understand. It’s learning communication and support
that turns boys into men.

It’s no one’s fault but my own, and I do understand.
As long as society continues to lie, it is all my fault,
and I hold in the cry.

Source: Illustrations from the Inside: The Beat Within (2007)

Haiku
by Etheridge Knight

1
Eastern guard tower
glints in sunset; convicts rest
like lizards on rocks.

2.
The piano man
is stingy at 3 A.M.
his songs drop like plum.

3.
Morning sun slants cell.
Drunks stagger like cripple flies
On jailhouse floor.

4.
To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.

5.
A bare pecan tree
slips a pencil shadow down
a moonlit snow slope.

6.
The failing snow flakes
Cannot blunt the hard aches nor
Match the steel stillness.

7.
Under moon shadows
A tall boy flashes knife and
Slices star bright ice.

8.
In the August grass
Struck by the last rays of sun
The cracked teacup screams.

9.
Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.

Incident
by Countee Cullen

For Eric Walrond

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Batimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

white lady

a street name for cocaine

wants my son
wants my niece
wants josie’s daughter
holds them hard
and close as slavery
what will it cost
to keep our children
what will it cost
to buy them back.

white lady
says i want you
whispers
let me be your lover
whispers
run me through your
fingers
feel me smell me taste me
love me
nobody understands you like
white lady

white lady
you have chained our sons
in the basement
of the big house
white lady

you have walked our daughters
out into our streets
white lady
what do we have to pay
to repossess our children
white lady
what do we have to owe
to own our own at last

by Lucille Clifton