“I can’t see ’em coming from my eye, so I had to make this poem cry.”—Jimmy McMillan, an incarcerated poet in California’s prison system
You can chain the body, the face, the eyes,the way hands move coarsely over cementor deftly on tattooed skin with needle.You can cage the withered membrane,the withered dream,the way razor wire, shouts, yells, and batonscan wither spirit.
But how can you imprison a poem?How can a melody be locked up, locked down?Yes, even caged birds sing,even grass sprouts through asphalt,even a flower blooms in a desert.
And the gardens of trauma we call the incarceratedcan also spring with the vitality of a deep thought,an emotion buried beneath the facadesdeep as rage, deep as grief,the grief beneath all rages.
The blood of such poems, songs,emotions, thoughts, dances,is…