May 2024
Bio Note: Pleased to have read with Lara Gularte and June Sanders for National Poetry Month and to soon have a poem published by Blue Heron Review. And enormously pleased spring is here, especially since its been such a long winter here in Lassen County.
Prison Portrait
Housed in a cell, the soul
squats in a cement corner.
It hums like the defunct hanging
alcoves of Old Folsom.
Some men break down,
while a few, mostly the young
make do with the salt and bread of labor;
each day a gray wipe-out
in the State’s fortress.
Concertina wire twangs.
It’s no dance tune. Prisoners know
work boots aren’t made for dancing,
nor do shackled feet shuffle
to any old razzamatazz.
Originally published in That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It, New Village Press, 2023
Absorption
The incarcerated man
grows so intent that his pencil
is nearly a finger
as he bends over the drawing
of his daughters Sofia and Sonia.
Were it possible
to accurately portray the man,
his skin tattoo-mapped,
I’d start with his eyes,
tell you how I see in them
the brown loaves of bread
his mother made, his mouth
about to form what’s not easy
for him to say in English.
If there is a heaven of words,
or at the very least a storage place,
what remains unspoken must go there.
It’s nearly yard recall
and the man still draws his daughters,
his head so close to the paper
that he could be outlining himself—
the shapes of their lovely mouths,
butterflies with spread wings.
Originally published in That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It, New Village Press, 2023
To Nuance or Not to Nuance
The men I worked with at Folsom Prison
walk single line
down the knife of night,
their eyes averted,
their blue jeans baggy
They could be on their way
to chapel,
Bibles in their hands,
and who knows what
in their back pockets
*
My drama instructor knows the poetry
of the body, each nuance a shift;
he lifts the sloping shoulders of one prisoner,
teases his mouth into a smile
“…. I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not
that I have bad dreams.”
*
In my dream, I am a frog leaping into heaven,
a moth perched on my tongue—
cool lake water glistening
off the green which is my frogness
Oh, Holy Father of leaping things
give me dominion over myself,
as well as those that wrestle
with hope’s illusive pond
Please bless these men who remain
chastised by public curse, by accusations,
some of which are legally true
*
I once thought trouble
a blight on the spirit,
but trouble is a shapeshifter it smiles like an angel,
dresses in shadowy garb
*
“Hamlet is like ballet,”
said the inmate in Arts in Corrections.
“How so?” I asked.
“It’s all such delicate stuff.”
Originally published in That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It, New Village Press, 2023
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