Exchange, Issue 3

EXCHANGE

ISSUE 03 2022

AN IWI PUBLICATION

Published annually at Columbia University (New York, NY)

Books printed offset and bound by Bookmobile Craft Digital (Minneapolis, MN)

Cover art by Abigail Cook

Design and layout by Colleen Reynolds

EXCHANGE 03 STAFF

MANAGING STAFF

Director

Heather Gluck

Art Director

Colleen Reynolds Outreach Manager

Preston DeGarmo

Social Media Manager

Zoe Hardwick

Nonfiction Editor

Leah Silverman Fiction Editor Selina Mao

EDITORIAL BOARD

Braudie Blais-Billie Camille Sensiba Cate Valinote Chyana Marie Sage Deschamps Ciera Robinson

Destiny Hall Emily Johnson Gabrielle McAree Garen Torikian

Genevieve Morel Shuster Kai-Lilly Kane Karpman Kaylee Jeong

Kellie Diodato

Leah Silverman Mishal Kazmi

Ronald Lee Robertson, Jr. Selina Mao Jessie Shohfi Anna Schwartzman Mia Xing Claire Kuo

Clare Elizabeth Donaldson Jude Misick Nafisa A. Iqbal

Eleanor Evelyn Hopson Tennyson

LYNN AND ANN ABIGAIL COOK

UNSTRUCTURED: A STORY OF INJUSTICE PHILLIP VANCE SMITH, II

THE VIRUS JUAN FRANCISCO MEJIA

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

WELCOME to the third issue of Exchange, a literary magazine of poems, essays, stories, and artwork exclusively by individuals who have faced imprisonment.

The Incarcerated Writers Initiative was started in 2016 as a way to share the knowledge and experience accrued by students of the Columbia MFA program with an overlooked, underserved, and silenced population. We consider it our responsibility and our pleasure to attempt to open the gates of academia and publishing to communities who do not otherwise have the means to access them.

Far from an act of charity, IWI is a pedagogical project in two directions. As student readers we are challenged, moved, and inspired by the work we receive. Our correspondents reach out to each year because we read their work earnestly and with the respect it merits. This magazine is titled Exchange because of our dedication to this free transmission of perspectives and ideas.

In this issue you will find writing that touches on the schism be tween incarcerated parents and their children, who grow up in the untouchable outside world. You will see a poem from the perspective of a victim of the Holocaust, a trauma that holds a person in a time and place forever. We have pieces on the cyclical nature of oppression and violence; on isolation, God, abandon ment. Some of these works take pains to make themselves clear, others relish in the incomprehensible and the inexplicable. Writers on the inside, because of and in spite of their carceral sta tus, have a prismatic infinity of creative expression, seeking a plat form. We are connected to those who write not just to express, but to survive. This magazine is an open line of communication, and we invite you to pick up the other end.

Heather Gluck Editor-in-Chief, Exchange

ALL I TALK ABOUT IS INCARCERATION

Abigail Cook

Maybe poems don’t have to rhyme anymore. Maybe there doesn’t have to be a meter. Because if things made sense in this world, I wouldn’t be here.

I wouldn’t have ten years of probation for a mistake I made as a teenager. My best friend’s family wouldn’t have to choose to bury or to cremate her.

I wouldn’t have nightmares caked in regret and disgust. I wouldn’t look in your eyes and see only distrust.

I would be a normal woman who crosses her legs and holds a job. I wouldn’t take anti-psychotics because paranoia makes my head throb.

And maybe this doesn’t have an end that is pretty or cinematic. Maybe my story ends quietly and collects dust in an attic.

ARES & HERMES Rusty Weddle

ON DROWNING

Peter Dunne

As troubled children often tend to do we exercised our right to happiness by taking life for granted. Death was beautiful. We sensed the world’s impending doom & threw ourselves into its mouth.

Bereft of calm we reached for you the way a drowning man extends his hands toward the sky when bubbles cloud the halcyon blue & burst with silence. No one told us it was normal to cry like a wave against the shore.

& so we never did. Instead we held it all inside of us.

CASTAWAYS

Peter Dunne

Running home, after three bullets burrowed into his flesh, my best friend collapsed in a heap on his mother’s stoop and, drowning in his own blood, begged for forgiveness.

With his final breath he did what all good sons do: he lied, telling Mami everything would be okay, as she, waist-deep in the night, cradled him in her arms like a little schooner,

guiding her baby, her only son, across uncharted waters, led solely by the tide of her heart upon a new horizon, until a wave of paramedics came and pulled him

from her breast. More poured out of them than the world ever deserved, but true libations tend to come in excess, for local obits claimed his mother just shy of a year later.

They say her heart, big enough to feed a whole block, shrank to a pea while she dreamt of her family’s farm in Mayagüez, P.R., a world she’d planned to return to with her daughter, hoping the guanabana and palm fronds would fan away the past like horsetails in mosquito clouds. But how unjust of me to presume to know how she felt,

or to alleviate my own guilt by sharing in their pain, since it was I, her adopted son, who taught him to drink until the bottle no longer reflected his late father’s face, to triple press X into G-ladies and stars, and wipe the shell casings clean before loading the clip. It was I who masked men wanted to hit with a torrent of hot lead and leave cold in the gutter, my brown eyes empty as the tears on a bandana. Out the passenger side window, upon seeing my friend,

hoodied and high, and thinking he was me, they fingered the trigger until death sang from the barrel—O beautiful end. Sometimes I wonder if, speeding off in the fog, his killers considered the consequences of their actions or felt the undertow of time foreshadowing their shipwreck into a greater ocean, but only because I know myself:

I’ve been a castaway for so long that home sounds like a mantra, one I recite sunup and sundown from the very center of my being. With all I have.

SOME MOTHER’S

DARLING

MEMOIR EXCERPT Benjamin Frandsen

IRREVOCABLE

The silent screaming of a soul as it’s ripped from the world. All too often my brain is a malfunctioning time machine, always bringing me back to the same moment. The same man. It never matters that he’d been caught burglarizing, or that he came at me. It only matters that in that instant I made my life more important than his. I don’t know how to forgive myself for that.

For a while I tried blaming what I’d done on those same buzz words the district attorney kept spewing at the jury: martial artist, U.S. Marine, trained killer. But words didn’t take a man’s life, I did. And his mother and father and sister and brother have felt that loss every day for almost nineteen years. I can’t pretend to ever fathom their anguish.

My own mother’s pain, though, I know, because she shared it with me: the agony of trying desperately to free her imprisoned child. The pain she endured hurt me far more deeply than my own fears and humiliations brought on by lock and key. She shared those with me, too. The strange and beautiful thing is that our relation

ship was strengthened by our helplessness, sweetened by having to overcome bitterness. Side by side, we battled the barbed-wire beast, reminding each other never to give up. This is our story. It is also the story of millions of American families, perhaps even yours. We need to tell the tales of our struggles. We are stronger together. The beast cannot conquer us all.

TIP DISCREPANCY

I sometimes wonder if I would have spent that morning differ ently if I had known it would be my last as a free man. I was living in a cabin in Yellowstone National Park, waiting tables at the Old Faithful Inn, a stately log hotel a scant hundred yards from its fa mous namesake geyser.

It was mid-September, but in Wyoming that is nigh on win ter, and I felt the chill in the mountain air as I crunched down the pine needle path. As I climbed the rickety stairs to the employee entrance, I was wearing an all-black waiter’s uniform, my Sony Dis cMan pumping bassy electronica through my earbuds.

A warm wall of freshly baked bread, roast beef, and sauteed rainbow trout met me when I turned into the kitchen. When I passed the walk-in cooler, a park ranger I knew by name was mouth ing noiseless words. I pulled out my earbuds.

“... gratuity discrepancy or something,” Mike was saying. “You mind stopping by the ranger station real quick?”

“Now?” I glanced at my watch—10:45 A.M. My shift started in 15 minutes.

“Should only take a second,” he lied.

I shrugged, stashed my DiscMan on the shelf below the condi ments, and trotted back down the stairs and across the parking lot. Stepping into the seemingly empty station, I saw a tall white man in a dark suit and red power-tie. A trim blonde woman in a navy pantsuit watched me in rapt attention.

“Have a seat, Mr. Frandsen,” the man instructed, sounding like Friday from Dragnet. I sat tentatively in the only seat left, the stiff order book in my apron making it hard to get comfortable. In uni son, they flipped open identical leather wallets, revealing shiny gold badges and photo IDs.

“My Frandsen, I’m Special Agent Cloney with the FBI. This is Special Agent Decker. You know what this is about, don’t you?”

I swallowed. “Not unless they take tip discrepancies really se

riously around here.” I was stalling. My heart thumped violently, sounding like underwater explosions in my ears.

Agent Cloney was not amused. He stood suddenly, jostling his chair and looming over me. “You know damn well why we’re here.”

His partner pulled two photos out of a binder and handed them to him. He held them in my face and I saw two slender men in their twenties. I quickly glanced away, but the eyes of the man on the left followed me, the same eyes that had been haunting my dreams like hell hounds on the trail of a wayward soul.

If justification was an art, my mind had become a Da Vinci, deftly stroking its canvas with dabs of truth to cover the stain of un certainty. He attacked you. It was self-defense. Then why couldn’t I sleep anymore? They were burglars. He had a weapon. Then who put this black stone in my heart?

They grilled me for several hours and, as my public defender Mr. Gottlieb was fond of pointing out, I talked as if I would die if I stopped. Some of it was fanciful, some of it dolled up in frilly mit igating dress, but as the words poured out, I could no longer hear the panting hounds on my trail. It wasn’t a confession: I knew my part in the deaths had been accidental. Neither was it absolution: hiding like a coward and denying others closure deserved no such healing balm. Soon enough everyone would learn that it had been an accident, and that I didn’t come forward because I was afraid no one would believe me.

The cold steel of the handcuffs encircled my wrists. Tucked into the back of the black government SUV, I glanced at Agent Decker. For the first time, I noticed she was pretty. She had the maj esty of a shark slicing through water towards their unwitting prey. The evergreens speeding past seemed to wave their boughs in sad goodbyes.

Strange what bubbles to the surface of the mind. As the SUV hurtled me away from my life, I thought, who’s gonna end up with my CD player? I closed my eyes and sank into a gray and dreamless sleep.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

As my U.S. marshal escort’s vehicle slowed and turned up the road to the prison, I sighed with relief. After spending two hours hunched sideways with hands cuffed behind my back, I was glad to arrive anywhere, so long as it meant getting out of the backseat.

The roaring metallic echo was staggering as the SUV eased into the vehicle bay under the rising electronic door. An armed marshal unfolded his wiry frame from the driver’s seat and stepped out, nod ding to the two Wyoming correctional officers. By tacit agreement, the three waited to speak until the loud door screeched shut again.

The pudgier of the two officers cast a wary glance at me through the SUV’s glass. “That him?”

The Marshal nodded, handing over two sheets of paper. Mr. Pudgy and his partner skimmed the two documents then snapped their heads in my direction, eyes narrowed. Suddenly, they seemed to be on high alert.

After opening the back door of the SUV, the Marshal frowned at my woven necklace.

“Can’t have that,” he said. With a practiced hand he whipped out and opened a folding knife. Holding the necklace away from my neck with his left hand, he chopped through it with his right—and sliced my left cheek. Not a deep cut, but the unexpectedness of it added to the sting.

With a sharp intake of breath, I looked at him accusingly, my cheeks blazing hot. He took a quick step backward. A warm droplet of blood trickled down my face.

“Sorry,” he said, his hands spread placatingly. “I didn’t—I slipped. Are you okay?”

Under the circumstances, the question struck me as so absurd that I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Studying his face, I de cided he was sincere, and I offered a slow nod. He helped me out of the tall backseat, a feat made more difficult because the handcuffs pinning my hands behind my back had rendered both arms numb. Gripping my upper arm, he led me over to the COs. “All yours,” said the Marshal.

“Great,” the skinnier CO muttered. “Thanks for gettin’ him all buttered up for us.” Watching the Marshal hop into his vehicle, Skinny turned to me.

“It was him that cut you; don’t get any ideas ‘bout tryin’ to take it out on us.”

Pudgy cleared his throat, waving the second document. Skinny nodded and radioed for two more COs. For the remainder of my stay at the Wyoming state prison facility, I would be escorted by four edgy-looking COs—two in front, two in back—every time I left the cell.

At twenty-nine, I had never even been to a proctologist, let alone been strip-searched by strangers, so the first time I was or dered to disrobe, bend over and cough, I thought I would die of embarrassment and shame.

That first night, I was relegated to a solitary cell where other inmates would not come in contact with me. As the prison’s only federal detainee, I was a visitor, prohibited from mingling with the local prisoners until Uncle Sam could arrange for my extradition to L.A. The electronic door clanged shut behind me with a finality that reverberates in me even now. Perpetually single, I was sur prised at the thought that then sprang up unbidden: I’ll never get to have a family.

Apparently federal regulations allow all new-arrival prisoners to make a phone call within seventy-two hours. In an effort to keep me from communicating with the outside, however, the govern ment circumvented this pesky rule by simply transferring me to a new prison every seventy-one hours. I patronized a jail in Montana and five prisons in Wyoming within three weeks. At each new stop I would put in an order for prison canteen items; each time I would be shipped out before the canteen arrived, so it would be mailed to my home instead.

At every facility I was escorted—legs and wrists shackled—by a four-CO squad, often with canisters of pepper spray aimed at my face. They wore masks of anger and suspicion, at times jabbing me with their batons to goad me into moving with more alacrity. I con tinued to be polite and obedient. After weeks of being treated like a dangerous beast, I felt like snarling and baring my teeth. It seemed to be expected of me, anyway.

My last Wyoming pit stop was the longest at a full week. Af ter the first few days without incident, a salty, gray-haired sergeant stopped outside of my cell. His wizened eyes peered at me apprais ingly through the narrow glass slit in the door.

“Starting to think they might have got you figured wrong,” he said. “You ain’t been trouble.” He tugged thoughtfully at his bushy mustache. I met his gaze with a gratitude that startled me with its intensity. These simple words were the first reminder I’d had in weeks that I was still human, and I felt suddenly overwhelmed. I blinked away the moisture in my eyes. Coming to a decision, the sergeant nodded once.

“I’m gonna change your status. Feds wouldn’t like it, but screw

‘em. Never liked them uppity fellas anyway. ‘Sides, I ain’t got the man power to have half my staff following you around like group ies.”

“Thank you sir,” I said, my voice dry and grainy from lack of use. “I won’t give you any problems.”

“No, I don’t expect you will. Frandsen, you even know why you been getting the dee-luxe bad boy treatment?”

“No sir, not a clue.”

Shaking his head, the sergeant smirked and slid a familiar-looking sheet of paper under the door, the second document delivered by the marshal weeks ago. It was a warrant with my name on it de claring my offense. Beneath the large FBI seal was an admonition in large, bold, and capital letters:

FBI WILL MAKE ARREST SUBJECT BLACK BELT POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS

My jaw dropped. Black belt? So what? I know an eight-year-old girl who has a black belt. I slid the paper back under the door.

“You need anything at the moment?”

“Yes sir,” I said immediately, my heart leaping in my chest. “I’d like to call my mom.”

He grunted affirmatively and walked me to a phone in an uninhabited module.

“Go on then.” He said. “I’ll come back for you in fifteen min utes.”

I smiled and scurried to the phone. When my mom heard my voice, she sobbed. “Oh, Benji, I’ve been trying to find you for weeks.” As we cried and talked, I realized something. This whole thing is even harder on her than it is on me.

“Don’t you dare give up hope, Benjamin.” She commanded. “God makes a way out of no way.”

I glanced around at my steel and concrete dungeon and wished desperately for that to be true.

“If you say so.”

“I do.” She sniffed. “Now I need to ask you something import ant. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, but,” she paused as she always did before a good punch line, “why are you sending me boxes of Top Ramen and candy bars every three days?”

I burst out laughing for the first time since my arrest. Our mad

giggles were like fists we shook at the void of separation and despair between us. In that moment, two facts branded me with white-hot certainty: I would make it through this, and I would breathe free air again. Many in my situation had clung vainly to these same two hopes. But they didn’t have my mother.

CHAINS AND PLANES

In my dream, I was fifty feet under water, sinking with heavy chains shackled to my ankles, pulling me to the ocean floor. From my wrists, the chains like rusty snakes had ensnared my mom and dad, dragging them down with me. The watery depths muffled my bubbling screams, and I thrashed my arms in vain to free my drown ing parents. When I looked up, my mother gazed down at me with sweet, sad eyes and mouthed, it’s okay, Benji. Each word released a slowly rising bubble. I tried to yell for her to untangle herself, but saltwater flooded my throat and scorched my lungs. Breathing was impossible.

With a loud gasp, I bolted up in bed. The underside of the up per bunk loomed above me like the lid of a steel beige coffin. I decided right then that, if given the option, I would choose the top bunk for the remainder of this journey.

A fast-talking baritone crackled through the P.A. system. “Wi ley, pack your stuff! Your ride’s here. Two minutes.”

Glancing around the cell, I chuckled mirthlessly. What stuff? I was fairly certain the FBI and scavenging Yellowstone employees had it all by now.

It was about a half-hour ride to the small, dusty airstrip on which waited a surprisingly posh Learjet. “DEA agents,” explained my shaggy-haired U.S. Marshal escort, “seized this and five other jets from a Colombian drug lord and turned them into federal air taxis.”

A female prisoner with a bob-cut and frosted hair was led over to the side of the plane, her staccato sobs the melody to her rhyth mic drag-chain shuffle. We waited side by side as the hatch opened and lowered until it was flush with the sand-dusted runway. The flipside of the hatch had metal stairs built into it that rose steeply into the aircraft. It was difficult to climb with shackled legs, but after some wobbly close calls, we were secured in cushy leather seats. Take-off was almost immediate.

Once her flow of tears began to ebb, the stout girl glanced at

me from across the aisle.

“What do they have you for?” She asked with a sniff.

“Right now they’re saying kidnapping. You?”

She shrugged. “Ecstasy.”

I’d sort of forgotten that my occasional weekend drug, “vita min E,” was illegal. When had my morals become so loose? “That’s a federal crime?”

Before she could reply, the marshal cut in. “It is when you get caught with three hundred pounds of it.” He flipped another page of his Guns & Ammo magazine. A rising, sharp wail escaped the girl’s lips as she sobbed with renewed vigor. The marshal rolled his eyes.

I felt a surge of Y-chromosomal protectiveness, wishing I could at least throw her a tissue and tell her it would be okay. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be—300 pounds of MDMA likely carried de cades in a federal penitentiary. But such is the impulse of caring souls: tell a comforting lie in times of need.

Her subdued mewling became my own mother’s trembling sobs as she willed herself to be strong enough for both of us. Be came the cries of the mothers of those two men, pleading with God for answers and comfort. And what could I tell them? Yes, their sons were burglars but they didn’t deserve to die? I’m so sorry— it was a reflex? What mother would care about anything but the all-consuming grief that once tore itself from King David’s throat, “Would that I had died instead of you, my son, my son!” What good would it do if I told them that every day for the last eternal month I wished I could trade places with their sons, that the last piece of me I recognized died along with them?

But I did not have the luxury of giving up because I knew my mother would not. Not if she had a breath of life in her body. For her, then. For her I would cling to the shards of myself and hope against hope that the carpenter she prayed to could rebuild shat tered glass.

THE SPIRIT OF ZARCON

The Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, where feder al inmates are housed until trial, was a swarming hive compared to the solitary confinement I’d experienced over the last month. There were nine floors, each divided into north and south wings. When the escorting CO used his huge jangling keyring to let me into my

assigned module, I braced myself. Would I be cuffed and shackled everywhere I went once again? Since the FBI had labeled me “dan gerous,” would I be tossed into a battleground of truly dangerous men?

As I stepped forward uncertainly a tremendous social clamor engulfed me. Well over a hundred men of all ages and races buzzed around the huge dayroom: chatting, slapping down pinochle cards, doing push-ups, playing chess. A few curious souls noted my new face. A CO in a blue sport coat and clip-on tie rose from his desk. His nametag read CO Davis.

“Welcome to Nine South,” he said cheerfully. “You’re Franzden?” He did not eye me warily or point pepper spray.

“Frandsen. Rhymes with Hansen,” I said automatically as I had for every substitute teacher since first grade.

“Gotcha. Okay, the rules. You want to smoke, do it on the pa tio by the weight machine. We have two stand-up counts at sixteen hundred and twenty-one hundred hours. If the alarm sounds, sit down on the floor wherever you are, and when the COs run in, stay out of the way.”

Davis handed me a white mesh laundry bag containing under wear, socks, towels, sheets, a blanket, drab olive pants and T-shirts, and pointed to a cell near the phones.

Phones, I thought. Mom’s probably worried. I hoisted the heavy bag over one shoulder and lumbered over to my new digs. The metal door was slightly ajar but I knocked lightly anyway. I was looking forward to finally sleeping after a midnight Learjet flight followed by a bumpy four-hour bus ride.

“Come in,” said a Kermit-like voice, clearing his throat.

As I pushed in I smelled stale sweat, cigarettes, and something cloying like hot sugar and meat. The scraggly-haired form was beached on the bottom bunk, bloated hands crossed over a moun tainous chest. He was 400 pounds at least.

“They call me Big Mike,” he croaked, tilting his head toward the top bunk.

“Why’s that?” I asked, heaving my bag onto the mat up top. Might as well see if he has a sense of humor. His formidable maw tried vainly to form words, the confusion evident on his face. That answers that.

“I’m Benjamin,” I extended a hand. He didn’t seem to see it.

“We’ll be fine,” he said, “as long as I don’t get mad.” Screwing

up his face, he turned yellowed eyes on me. “Last time I got mad at a guy, my spirit warrior Zarcon took me over and I bled out my eyes and the guy died. Ya know what I mean?”

“I know enough.” I rolled the thin mat around my laundry bag, picked it all up and marched right back out of the cell. Off to one side of the dayroom I dropped the bag, unrolled the mat on the floor, and lay down, closing my eyes. A smattering of laughter flut tered around the room. Footsteps approached and stopped right behind my head. “Frandsen?”

I opened my eyes and found myself staring at an upside-down CO Davis.

“What are—you can’t sleep,” he struggled to keep his compo sure, “on your mat, in the dayroom.”

“Then please tell me where I can, sir, because I am not going back in there with Zarcon.”

X-WING FIGHTER

“I went to my parents and had turkey,” my mom pouted. “But it wasn’t Thanksgiving without you.” she reached across the visiting room table and squeezed my hand. This was our seventh visit now so we were becoming well-versed in what constituted “excessive” contact and what was allowed. She took a deep breath, readying herself for something.

“Benji, I need to talk to you. We need…” covering her face with one hand, she choked back a sob and sighed loudly. After a mo ment, she lowered her hand, placed her palms flat on the table, and met my gaze. “We need to come up with all the ways I’ve failed you as a parent.”

I stared at her as if she were speaking another language.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Your investigator, Monica, says it’s extremely important. They’re doing ‘death penalty protocols’ and they need… to present mitigation to show why they shouln’t… execute you.”

“What? You’ve never failed me. I was the one who was hanging out with people I only knew from nightclubs and getting sucked into—”

“Never mind that,” she growled. “That doesn’t help us. This is about me, what I did or neglected to do that might have contribut ed to you…” she waved her hands helplessly.

“Being here,” I finished. I shook my head, furious at this whole

process for forcing us to think along these disloyal lines. “I don’t know. This is stupid.”

“Benjamin. You have court tomorrow. We have to do this.”

Gritting my teeth, I said, “Maybe… well, neither you nor Dad ever really taught me how to handle money. I mean, the last several years you’ve been good with it. But by then I’d already…”

“Learned how to be bad with it?”

I nodded.

“You’re right. I’m sorry for that Benjamin.”

“Mom, stop it. You don’t need to apologize for…” I stopped as the realization hit me. When I spoke, it was in a whisper. “You blame yourself for this?”

Her hand reached out urgently for mine, a drowning girl grasp ing for a life preserver. Tears pooled in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks.

“Of course I do. How could I not? You’ve never been in trouble, not even when I was lost in my addiction. Maybe if I’d—”

“Don’t.” I snapped. “‘That way madness lies.’” I reached out and wiped her cheeks with the back of two fingers. Technically not allowed, but the guard pretended not to notice.

“You can’t quote me to me.” She sniffed with feigned indig nance.

“Why not? You’re the smartest person I know.”

Her wave of sadness passed and she dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Thanks. But it’s Shakespeare, anyway.”

“It was the X-Wing Fighter,” I informed her seriously.

“The which?”

“I was twelve. All I wanted in the world was Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing Fighter so I could put him and R2D2 in it and fly them all around the house.” I sighed tragically. “But you wouldn’t buy it for me. That’s why I’m here. You failed me as a parent.”

She snorted a laugh, “I brought you into this world, boy, and I can take you out of it!”

“Oh, and the threats. Write that down, too. Monica can use that.”

Her giggles blurped out so loudly that we didn’t hear them an nounce the visit was over. When we noticed everyone rising from their tables we followed suit, and I smothered her in the hug we both so badly needed.

LA FAMILIA

Ramelle Kamack

The green three-cornered package arrived on a Saturday morning. An emerald triangular cardboard case with a spreading tree graphic printed on its cover. The tree trunk was a double helix that spiraled upward until it blossomed into a verdant bunch of leaves. Brilliant marketing, overnight shipping, certified mail that required a sig nature upon arrival as your nosiest neighbors peek from behind their blinds. This company made it evident—only the best for its 700,000 customers and growing. Cathy scribbled her name for the deliveryman and wrapped the package in her arms.

Seemingly overnight, Genealogy Tree Inc. had become a trending status symbol that everyone with a pulse was trying to be a part of. While most ancestry and gene sequencing companies of fered their dwindling number of customers the common service that divided your ethnic makeup by percentages before climaxing into a whimsy pie-chart display, this company felt more like an exclusive country club, complete with a pedigree chart and V.I.P. membership.

After you send your swab of saliva, their team of geneticists use a patented process to analyze your gene pool, before charting your

family tree back to its places of origin. Then their private investiga tors, archivists, and researchers dig up any and everything to give you a complete view of your history. But the best part is that each customer earns a discounted rate on a five-day four-night premium vacation package to their homeland through Genealogy Tree’s de luxe travel agency. Barcelona, Venice, Nice, Lisbon… Cathy’s an cestors could be from anywhere or any place.

Gwyn, the woman who manicured Cathy’s nails every other Friday afternoon, found out that she was one-eight Aboriginal and spent the spring in Australia reconnecting with her roots. Bethany, her Wednesday evening spin class instructor, discovered that she was six percent Egyptian and visited the pyramids of Giza on cam el-back. Cathy’s eyes gleamed with the possibilities.

Perhaps her package would reveal that she was mixed with something daring or mysterious that she could post about online to make her girlfriends pout with envy. Maybe with this discovery of her ethnic makeup she would learn something more than what her dull and boring life had to offer. It could give her a legacy, some thing bigger than being a mom, a wife, and a human resources su pervisor whose most impressive accomplishments were awarding the office Casual Fridays and a new coffee machine that dispensed cappuccinos.

Package in hand, Cathy scurried back to the house where Blake and the kids gathered in the living room for the big reveal. She had decided beforehand to make a little celebration of it, with him re cording the entire event. She skipped up the porch and from the weight of the triangular carton she imagined its contents: stacks of late ancestors’ photos, piles of original birth and death certificates, forgotten family members’ names, family stories, lost traditions that had been unearthed and ready to be honored. She whirled through the front door three sets of wide and curious eyes imme diately surrounded her. Seconds away from a moment that could alter her very life, Cathy couldn’t keep her hands from trembling.

“I can’t do it,” she grinned while her cheeks turned a rosy pink. “Here, Blake, you do it.”

Blake smiled and took the package while his wife buried her face in her hands. She was uncharacteristically nervous when it came to opening surprises and he loved every second of it. It had been his idea for Cathy to send her DNA to Genealogy Tree. Not that she necessarily needed clarity into her history or to be trans-

formed into a “new” version of herself—she was amazing the way she was—but the way she gaped at the company’s commercials hadn’t escaped his notice. Genealogy Tree’s latest 30-second ad vertisement took place in a small apartment where a family of five sat on plain grayish furniture while flipping through dog-eared books and twiddling their thumbs. The only bit of color between them was their green Genealogy Tree that illuminated when the wife took in her hands. When she opened the triangle’s lid, the screen sparkled and the family’s living room transformed into a tropical beach with swaying palm trees, coconut-spiked beverages, and ukulele-playing islanders with floral garlands wrapped around their necks. Afterward, their kids snorkeled through a school of ne on-colored fish while the parents sprawled on twin massage tables. In the concluding image, the family sailed off into the sunset on a catamaran that careened over crystal blue waters. The tagline A new you awaits faded into the screen before the picture clicked to the next commercial.

Blake hardly believed that any knowledge acquired today could meaningfully change their comfortable suburban Iowa lives. But he had to admit, it would be nice for them and the kids to go on an adventure, and a good opportunity to spotlight Cathy, who works so hard.

He held the package close to Cathy and pried at the cardboard lid. “Okay everybody,” he announced while surveying the children’s glowing faces. “Ready?”

Her husband removed the lid; the kids leaped and crowded the package. “What’s in there Daddy?” Their heads and tiny shoulders, blocking and shielding what lay inside.

“What is it? What’s inside?” Cathy asked. “Let me see.” She parted through them and squeezed past. Cathy’s eyes fell towards the green carton as her husband’s hands sorted through it—flip ping, folding, and sifting through beige and water stained papers. Blake’s face scrunched as though he smelled something rotten. “What is this junk?”

“Give it to me.” Cathy took the package, and with her husband and kids trailing close behind, she strode toward their coffee table. She pushed several magazines to the side and dumped the carton’s contents on the wooden surface. Newspaper clippings, faded Po laroids, and crinkled journal paper toppled onto the table and the carpet beneath. Cathy rummaged through them, her eyes scanning

and searching through each document and printed text. Her high school transcripts, her and Blake’s marriage certification, a DMV photo of her when she was eighteen, leaflets of her mom’s jour nal entries, mortgage receipts, her grade school reports cards, her mother’s report cards, old résumés. Crap, refuse, trash… It was all useless! Copies of things that no one wanted, junk that was easily accessible and already piled in dusty boxes in their attic.

Several of the beige documents were in Spanish and stamped with what appeared to be a government insignia —a towering vol cano with a streaking sun and the word Contras printed above it. Each of the documents were addressed to some woman named Cassandra. There was no one in her family that she knew of by that name. Within the documents, she spotted a white sheet of print ed percentages with a photo clipped to it. Cathy held the weath ered picture in her hand. Tattered, warped by dried moisture, and littered with fingerprint smudges, the photo had passed through many hands and traveled far to reach hers. On it, a golden-brown Latina woman with thick and wavy long hair posed with a machete in her hand. Slim, with bare arms, she flexed one bicep while a lush rainforest enveloped the area behind her. On the woman’s shoulder was a charcoal-colored tattoo—the identical volcano and sun im age from the foreign documents.

“Who’s that?” Blake asked from over Cathy’s shoulder.

“I don’t know,” she said, turning to the sheet of paper. It was her pedigree chart and the genealogist’s side notes.

Her eyes tightened as she studied her genealogy: Sixteen per cent Dutch, twenty-three percent Polish. That was a mild surprise; neither family on her mother’s side or her father’s had come from the Netherlands or Poland. She read further. Just then, her eyes widened. Sixty percent Nicaraguan?

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she gasped while skipping to the genealogist’s jotted notes. In her hand, the paper crinkled under the pressure of her trembling thumb. Her sharp eyes traced over it again before they locked on the old photograph. There, on that paper image of captured time, the machete-wielding woman smiled at her as though she knew this moment would come. This can’t be. Just moments ago, Cathy had opened the package in search of something new, something that hadn’t discovered about herself. But this was not what she had hoped for.

Blake reached for her hand while studying his wife’s stoic and pallid face. “What is it? What does it say?” he asked.

The kids gathered around. “What is it Mom?”

“It says,” her voice quivered as she turned toward them. “that this woman is my mother… and that my parents aren’t who they say they are.”

Civil unrest had ravaged the land for nearly a decade. Broth er fighting brother. Homes destroyed and houses collapsed. Entire towns smoldered in the aftermath of flames while the sounds of gunfire and exploding grenades were more rampant than the com fort of voices. So many families had fought against each other and died in battle, many of them lost sight of who they were fighting for or which side they were on. The future of the Nicaraguan govern ment was bleak. On one side, the loyalists who called themselves Sandinistas. Their opposition, a smaller group of rebels named Contras who set up bases in Honduras to fight from across the border. Within one of their camps, a lone soldier held her child as she peered towards the horizon.

Ramona clutched her infant daughter against her chest. The evening breeze came from the south. It tickled her skin and carried the scent of gunpowder and carnage. She hadn’t come to loathe the scent of death, but had become accustomed to it. She wondered if women on the other side of the world were subjected to the same hardships. She doubted it. The Madonnas of Venice had their lovely canals where the summer wind swept the aroma of jasmine and lav ender over the flowing water. The belles of Paris had their fields of blooming wildflowers—speckled with purple and pink as if Manet had painted them. The daughters of Nicaragua were not afforded such pleasantries.

Sweat and blood were their perfume, anguish, their company. Her daughter deserved a better future than this—such a sweet and happy baby. And this was no palace for a child. Still, the cause needed her. She couldn’t abandon them at a time like this, with their backs pressed against the wall, yet victory within reach. She took in her daughter’s soft face one more time, hoping this wouldn’t be the last.

Just then, a faint hum sounded from the distant clouds. A small three-engine transport plane banked over the hills and lowered towards the airstrip. A glimmer of sun graced its metallic wings.

1983 Honduras, 18 miles southwest of the Mosquito Coast

Fresh water was a rare commodity and anything other than green bananas had become a luxury. The camp welcomed the plane with a hearty cheer as its wheels screeched over the hardened dirt and it taxied them. As the door slid open behind the whirling propeller blades, Ramona greeted the American pilot and his wife.

“Fred. Paula. It’s been too long.”

The pilot hugged her first. His smile was warm and kind. “Ra mona, even in the middle of war you’re still as stunning as ever.” He pointed toward the infant. “And plus one, I see.”

“This is my daughter. Her name is Cassandra.”

“Such an adorable girl,” his wife chimed in.

Fred’s smile shortened and his eyes grew sharp. “Ramona, where’s your husband? We brought news from Santiago. He says the troops are advancing. You don’t have much time.”

“The sergeant’s dead,” her voice cracked. “I’m in charge for now.” His eyes softened and he rested a hand on her shoulder.

Several seconds passed before he lowered his voice and said, “Ramona, it doesn’t look too good. You can’t hold them off for much—”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. Her face, stern and unwavering. “I need a favor from you, Fred. A big one.” She extended her child into his arms. “Please. Take her away from here. I can’t protect her.”

Fred and Paula looked upon the child. She was beautiful and so innocent. How could they take care of such precious cargo?

Ramona pressed further, “Take her away from this.” “Come with us.”

“I can’t.”

“Listen—”

Just then, distant gunfire sounded from the forest. “Go, now! Hurry!”

Within seconds, a crowd of men scrambled to unload the car go, and Fred rushed to the plane with Paula, the infant in his grasp. Though she needed to move, Ramona stood for a moment in si lence as the plane rattled to life, propellers whirling. It leaped from the ground then rose into the fading sky– steady and swift, hum ming and climbing– until it disappeared beyond the clouds. It was the last time Fred and Paula stepped foot in the war-torn rainforests of Honduras.

In the cockpit, Paula cradled the weeping child in her arms—a bestowed bundle of grace and purpose.

“What are we going to do?” Fred said while guiding the plane. Paula sighed. “We’re going to bring her back home and take care of her. We’ll raise her as our own,” she said before announc ing the baby’s new name, a name she believed would suit her new American identity.

“Cathy.”

Abandoned. Adopted. Lied to! Cathy huffed after ending the call with her father, Fred, or whoever that man was to her now. She wasn’t certain of anything anymore. How could she be? This morning she woke up as Cathy Brumfield from Iowa, born an only child to Fred and Paula. She had taken ballet as a child, graduated from Cedar Rapids High School, then Grinnell College. A daughter to third-generation corn farmers. She sat next to her husband.

“I don’t think this changes things,” Blake said flatly while wrap ping an arm around her. Blake, so sweet and kind, but Cathy was amazed how stupid her husband could be at times. “Are you crazy? How can this not change things?”

“Well, I mean you shouldn’t let it change things. Your relation ship with Fred and Paula doesn’t have to be different if you don’t want it to be. Sure, it’s shocking, but still… they’re your parents.”

“They lied to me for my entire life.”

“Or, they protected you.”

“I deserved to know the truth. I deserved to know who I am.”

Now, she was Central American, the daughter of Nicaraguan rebels, named “Cassandra” at birth, without a clue about her biological family or who she was anymore. She shut her eyes, and massaged her temples. She had expected Genealogy Tree Inc. to unveil a distant relation from a strange land, a source of excitement and a place to take a vacation, not a family secret of this scope—a betrayal.

“Look.” Blake sifted through the jumbled pile and reached for a short stack of journal paper. “While you were on the phone with Fred I read a few of these journal entries. They’re Paula’s. Genealo gy Tree wouldn’t have sent these to you if they couldn’t bring some sort of clarity to your life—adoptive mother or not. You should take a look.”

“What could these tell me about the truth?”

“Want me to read a few to you?”

Cathy exhaled and took the papers, twenty sheets of Paula’s

flowing cursive. She could recognize this handwriting anywhere. The looping C’s, curling G’s, a slanting tilt that made the letters ap pear to be toppling over. It was the same handwriting that had been on countless field trip permission slips and sick notes when she was a child, the same script that appeared in her dorm room mail and comforted her during her toughest semesters in college. Cathy raised the first sheet and took a deep breath. With Blake harking on every word, she read it aloud.

During the summer harvest, Iowa is a generous place that adorns itself in a robe of gold and yellow. As the sun rises above the farmlands and its rays shimmer over infinite valleys of corn, gold finches take to the morning sky and sing of her glory. Beyond Prairie Creek and over the careening riverboats, a small farm rests beside a row of oak trees. On the stoop of their cozy house made into a home, Fred and Paula sat on their porch swing and watched over young Cathy as she played in the field. That is, until the gray sedan arrived.

The car crept down the road at a timid pace, cautious and unsure through the aisle of corn. Fred and Paula weren’t expecting visitors. Though occasionally, a septic tank salesman or a life in surance agent would come by unexpectedly and sit a while to rest up a bit and discuss business. Fred squinted towards the car. Dark shades veiled the driver’s eyes while hands gripped the steering wheel. A brunette woman. No passenger. No license plate. The sedan’s wheels crunched over the gravel and left ribbons of dust behind it. The car veered towards the house and stopped near the porch. It sat there for half a minute, engine purring, before it shut off. Fred stood and descended the porch’s steps as the driver’s door opened. From it, in a dark blouse and with her hair pulled back into a neat bun, Ramona emerged into the sunlight.

“Ramona!” he gasped.

She strode toward him and removed her sunglasses. Her eyes creased in the bright sun and revealed a cluster of wrinkles. It was difficult to tell whether time had hardened them or if the war had. Fred decided that it was most likely a combination of both.

Ramona smiled as they embraced. “Are you more surprised to see me alive or to see me here in Iowa?”

“We knew you’d make it out alive,” Paula said while joining them. “It’s so good to see you. How’d you know where to find us?”

A wry smile sprawled across her lips. “I have my ways.”

Just then, the sound of a child’s laughter came from the corn field.

“Oh!” Paula exclaimed. “You have to see her. She’s grown so much.”

Fred turned towards the field and called his daughter. “Cathy, baby, come here, please!”

“Cathy?” Pain gripped Ramona’s voice and her eyes sharpened. “You changed her name?”

Fred and Paula’s eyes softened. Though they had hoped that Ramona had still been alive, they hadn’t expected a day like this to come. “Well, ” Paula sighed. “We figured a more anglicized name would make it easier for her to fit in here.”

Ramona’s lips pressed together and she nodded slowly; her fi ery eyes never wavering from Paula’s face. Just then, the sound of swift patter came from the field.

“Cathy, come here darling. I want you to meet someone.”

She rushed to her father’s side, smiling and glowing from the morning sun. Ramona gazed toward the child, a miniature replica of herself, and was at a loss for words. She hadn’t seen her since that horrible day back in Honduras, as an infant, five years ago. Cathy eyed the stranger with curiosity.

“Cathy,” Paula said, kneeling towards the child. “Say hello to Ramona.”

Cathy’s soft round eyes met the stranger’s. “Hello,” Ramona waved before extending her hand toward the girl.

Cathy withdrew behind her father’s legs.

Rejected. Betrayed. Humiliated. Ramona’s eyes met Fred’s. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll warm up to you. Come,” he said while gesturing towards the porch chairs. “Let’s have a seat.”

Ramona lingered for a moment. She had been through war and battles, had buried her husband, had mourned her brothers and sis ters, and had traveled across the world to be here and to be with her daughter, and for what? Only, to find out that they hadn’t even told the girl about her real mother? About the sacrifices that she made to preserve her life? About the revolution that she was born during? About the legacy of the Contras?

Silence subdued her as she followed Fred and Paula to their little porch chairs where the estadounidenses enjoyed their peace-

ful lives with someone that didn’t belong to them, on a quiet little farm where corn grows as far as they can see, while her people in Nicaragua were starving to death.

“Sweet tea?” Paula interrupted Ramona’s thoughts and extend ed a glass of brownish liquid to her. A crisp lemon slice garnished the beverage.

“Thank you.” Ramona accepted the glass and took in the fresh air. It smelled a bit strange. Too stiff for her liking. Cathy scampered off to play in the tire swing under one of the grand oaks. As she did, the three adults watched, avoiding conversation, before someone braved rescue from the awkward silence.

Fred cleared his throat and said, “How have you spent the last five years? We had expected you to come before now.”

Ramona sipped the tea with her eyes peering over the glass’s rim. “War has a way of ruining plans. You should know that as well as anyone else. I would’ve come sooner but… I was kept away.”

He watched her closely then said, “What about the ceasefire?”

Ramona fumbled with the glass and tea sloshed onto the porch. She had assumed that they wouldn’t have heard about the ceasefire agreement between the Contras and the Sandinistas. Then again, news does spread fast, especially in the business of war. “Clumsy me,” she said.

“Your country seems to be at peace,” Paula said. “Do you think you could be too?”

Ramona’s lips curled into a pained snarl. “There will never be peace as long as a Sandinista is in office.”

“Even at the cost of depriving your daughter of her mother and depriving yourself of her? Can’t you see that you have a choice now? War has destroyed your family enough and it will continue to do so.” He pointed towards Cathy. “But you still have her.”

Ramona’s eyes shifted away from him. She knew they wouldn’t understand. “My country needs me.”

“Your daughter needs you too.”

They sat in silence once again, their minds presenting and re jecting solutions.

Paula wrenched her hands, stood and stepped over the puddle of tea and ice. “I’ll go fetch a rag to clean up this mess.”

She vanished into the house and the sound of her footsteps faded. Ramona turned to Fred. “How could you change her name? I trusted you to take her away from the war. Not to change her, lie to

her…But then, apparently, she’s not my daughter anymore, is she? You saw how she reacted when I reached for her.”

“You’re wrong, Ramona. All we’ve done is make a home here for her, a family here that you can also be a part of.”

“And do what?” she cackled. “Farm corn and sip tea? I’m a sol dier, not a freeloader. I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t,” Fred said harshly.

“The revolution in Nicaragua has already begun. There’s no stopping it this time. I shouldn’t have come here.” She stood and stepped toward the car before Fred gripped her wrist.

“There will always be someone to fight, some revolution to be part of, some people battling over power that can never be theirs. But you have only one daughter, one chance to raise her. If you walk away from her this time… don’t come back. ”

Ramona snatched her arm away before walking toward the car. As she did, Paula came from the house and stood next to her hus band. The sedan’s engine came to life and not a second after, the car curled around in a cloud of dust and sped down the dirt road from where it came. With little Cathy playing not far from there, swinging in the tire and humming nursery rhymes, Fred and Paula watched until the vehicle was out of sight, never to return.

Cathy laid Paula’s journal entries down and turned to her hus band. Over the next few weeks, she and Blake delved deeper into the package’s contents, uncovering lost stories, recreating history, resurrecting things from days past. They had begun with the typed letters addressed to Cassandra. Not long after Ramona had left Iowa and returned to Nicaragua, the Sandinistas and Contras erupted in another war. According to the documents, she had died in a gov ernment raid—they found her alone. She hadn’t surrendered when the men came for her that night. And long after the array of gunfire sounded, the Sandinistas and the Contras battled further, but Ramona’s war had come to an end.

Cathy felt loss, compassion and also empathy for the mother she never knew, the woman who believed she could not be a part of her life. The Nicaraguan government had seized most of Ramo na’s remaining accounts and assets, but, according to her wishes, had left one piece of property to her only living relative—a daugh ter named Cassandra. An unclaimed two-story house with several terraces that overlooked the Mosquito Coast. “Well, we might be

taking a trip after all,” Blake had said.

That evening, she visited Fred and Paula—her parents, not by blood, but by care. The two people that had raised and loved her, rescued her from a situation that might have taken her life and tried to do what was best. Old and gray, Fred and Paula welcomed their daughter as they always had. Sitting on the porch with her and looking over the golden cornfields, they shared treasured stories of Cathy’s youth and even recalled the endearing and happy times spent with Ramona before the war.

And that following summer, Cathy, with her husband and chil dren, traveled to the Mosquito Coast and sailed over the Gulf’s blue water. Beside her the entire time, were Fred and Paula. In her heart was Ramona. It wouldn’t be the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

STRIPPED

Craig Elias

Cold linoleum. Colder when my boots come off. Socks come off.

Don’t shake ‘em. I don’t like when guys shake ‘em. Hand ‘em to me one at a time.

My brown button-down goes. And my pants. Folded and set on the counter with the rest.

Tee shirt migrates to the plastic chair where my socks have taken up residence. Boxers follow.

Show me behind your ears. Finger-sweep your mouth. Under your tongue.

Head and shoulders knees and toes knees and toes. I stare him in the eye. My retinas read his.

Penis testicles lift. He’s locked in my ocular tractor beam. Turn around.

Bend and spread. My form is perfect. An olympic diver’s pike. My score a 9.8. I hold. Hold. Hold. Make him look. Make him say That’s enough. Make him say it again.

Oh, my bad. I didn’t hear you.

I take my time dressing. I take my time. My time.

WAITING

Gustavo Guerra

Dear God, I cried this morning while I read the book of Genesis. It says you created the heavens and the earth, that you put lights in the sky to divide day from night and to give light to the earth. I tried to talk to you afterwards, knees curled beneath me, as I wept into my charcoal gray blanket, but the words would not come out. Only the sorrow. The loneliness. The agony that made my stomach cramp to contain, in vain, the moan escaping from my lips. There were too many people around me. The Book says you looked upon the day and the night and you called it good. My night, my God, is not good. No day separates it. My night began seventeen years ago when I became a killer: a Moses; a David; a Cain. They had families and spoke to you face-to-face. They ruled your people and performed miracles and wrote poetry and being one of the many should be enough, but it’s not. I am not satisfied with the absence of love

and of passion. The type that shakes the foundations of the earth and echoes into the distant future. Nor am I satisfied with life behind the wire. I cry because I look at the sun and despite its brightness, its light does not penetrate my circumstances. On the sixth day you created man in your image. Thousands of years later you created me to love and to have and to laugh. Except, I do none of these. I exist in night, in darkness, waiting for your light to shine. I wait for the good. Your son, Gus.

THE SONG OF THE CONCH SHELL

Darcie L. Riggle

In this place you can find conch shells as big as mangoes. In this memory the conch shell tells me a story.

The tears I swore I would never shed again well up as I am drawn in by the muse. The story she whispers comes from the depths, centuries of wisdom from the four corners of the world, now it dwells in the chambers of this conch shell. Her song of nu merous sands and vast seas unlocks the heart and soul. She tells me how it came to be, the conch rolled in on a tide lured by the moon. It is a moon-drawn tide just like that which carries me back to this place, a place only the blind come to see, by listening to the song of the conch.

The song tells of a shine that sparks in the world beneath. I see the glint of a treasure, one priceless and true with a reddish-gold hue. In this place, the waters may be from the shallow gulf, but the tears that well up in my heart come from greater depths. The glint I see comes from a spark that spoke of Bon-son-gi, new fire in Na vajo, which runs in the veins of the earth and comes from the orig inator, God. I see the signet ring of our grandfather—or is it the shimmer of a golden key that unlocks this memory? I see myself

being caught in a rain of birdseed. As I look to the ground the seeds bounce and roll into the cracks of the concrete. The vision comes alive, and moments later a flower sprouts up and unfolds—reach ing and spiraling ever upward, in the very place where we took the first steps of our journey.

My tears rain onto the heart as heaven upon a mountaintop, and it flows from my heart to this pen. The words bubble up as from a volcanic vent. I am left blinded, and can only stare until the great trembling has ceased. It is a trembling like a seismic jolt, as a hawk flies peacefully overhead. The hawk pulls me into flight, into a dream. The hawk sits opposite a Shaman with a bonfire between them. He says the Shaman speaks a language he does not know. “Teyiwa, Koiwa.” The Shaman picks up hot ash from the fire and blows it into his face. When he closes his eyes and opens them he is no longer in his body. He is flying above himself. He is the heart come from greater depths. The glint I see comes from a spark that spoke of Bon-son-gi, new fire in Navajo, which runs in the veins of the earth and comes from the originator, God. I see the signet ring of our grandfather—or is it the shimmer of a golden key that un locks this memory? I see myself being caught in a rain of birdseed. As I look to the ground the seeds bounce and roll into the cracks of the concrete. The vision comes alive, and moments later a flow er sprouts up and unfolds—reaching and spiraling ever upward, in the very place where we took the first steps of our journey.

My tears rain onto the heart as heaven upon a mountaintop, and it flows from my heart to this pen. The words bubble up as from a volcanic vent. I am left blinded, and can only stare until the great trembling has ceased. It is a trembling like a seismic jolt, as a hawk flies peacefully overhead. The hawk pulls me into flight, into a dream. The hawk sits opposite a Shaman with a bonfire between them. He says the Shaman speaks a language he does not know. “Teyiwa, Koiwa.” The Shaman picks up hot ash from the fire and blows it into his face. When he closes his eyes and opens them he is no longer in his body. He is flying above himself. He is the hawk, has become the hawk, or I have. It is dark and silent. As he looks down he can see himself and the Shaman sitting on the mountain. He is the hawk flying in the distant sky, and his spirit soars free.

My soul longs to soar with you, but I cannot become this vi sion. I fall back to the ocean. I become a flying fish skipping from one wave to the next. I am not allowed to take flight. I sink under

the surface to find meaning in the place where I am blinded by the light of all treasures. I am ever adrift, like in the stories of unplotted ghost ships on the meniscus of this world, with a seemingly empty hull and a fractured, carved figurehead on the prow. The tattered sails are flown with the breath of God, and this vessel rides on indi go oceans, just as my quill bleeds.

MY FIRST BIKE RIDE

He was a burly, scraggly-bearded salesman of a different time, or perhaps no time at all, traveling from town to town alone on his tandem bike. Above each seat rested a parasol, kept in place by LED-infused duct tape. He coasted constantly between Main Streets, the empty seat on the back of his bike a permanent invita tion to accompany him.

Likewise, his Pink Lady apple cheeks and the way one eye crinkled slightly when he smiled screamed friend. Combined with his tie-dye corduroys, pizza sauce-stained and faded Super Mario Bros shirt, and slightly asymmetrical white guy ‘fro, it was easy to overlook the fact that his canines were needle sharp and extra long, and that his dark brow eyes faded all the way to black as his pupils swallowed his irises in the sun. Perhaps the loquacious pet raven on his shoulder or the odd array of bruise-colored umbrellas, pinwheels, and razor-edged kites he touted as both signage and inven tory could have been a clue… but who can tell for sure what some things mean in the moment?

My first glimpse of this well known stranger was of him cycling between high rise hotels, pedaling and peddling down Atlantic Av

Taj Alexander Mahon-Haft

enue, parallel to the beach.

I met him officially the next day on the boardwalk, posted up with his wares. I was compelled by curiosity to sneak away from our family beach blanket to see what he was all about. Everyone else was busy digging in the hazy glare at the water’s edge, seeking sand crabs to populate the castle’s moat, so I just bolted away with a halfhearted excuse that I needed a drink, my last one still sticky on my lips.

Though there seemed to be constant throngs around him from afar, he was conveniently free at exactly the moment I strolled up. He smiled. Chuckled. Chimed: “greetings, salutations, and expec tations,” like a gull convincing a tourist to share some fries. “I knew I’d make a new friend today.”

I swallowed, uncharacteristically nervous, with my theater nerd Underoos still in my dresser drawer. I felt my throat clench as I stammered, “Hi.”

He responded, “Yes, and soon you will be, too.” He proceed ed to inquire, “Have you ever wondered what the ocean looks like from above the boats but below the planes? Did you know there’s a bike path in the sky?”

In the two decades since, I have never been able to recall exact ly how the bike looked on the day I rode it. It’s like a gray veil was pulled over the face of my full memory.

I do know that the frame of the bike was slightly rusty, in a way that Mike and Frank would call charming patina before congratu lating the picker whose house they were currently raiding without a warrant. It said Huffy on the side, but I’m sure it wasn’t manufac tured on a Midwestern assembly line. It offered many speeds, but no gears were evident to control them.

We rode together that first time, the pedals spun themselves, moving my legs faster than they’d gone before. We covered the dis tance to the broadwalk’s shimmering blacktop terminus before I could take two deep breaths. Even though the pedals turned effort lessly, my chest was heaving and I’d sweated dark orange patches in the pits of my faded Hokies tee.

At the end of the concrete, instead of meeting the unexpected quagmire of sand and rubber tires of the street, the bike mounted on an invisible ramp and went upwards, above it all. It reminded me of the path across the bottomless chasm to the Holy Grail in the third Indiana Jones movie. It was physically there, but it couldn’t be

seen: it looked like the ground beneath me from whichever angle I stared at it. And then even that disappeared. The captain of the impossible ship cackled at me, somewhere between a drunken, jo vial uncle at Thanksgiving and the Wicked Witch of the West. The parasols above the seats began spinning and whirring and I was en tranced.

Vague images of wonder remain painted on the flickering firelit caves of my memory, but no coherent path was paved.

I recalled whales spouting octopus ink, the creatures joined in friendship at a rave.

Dolphins playing soccer with anemones. Sea turtles and cor morants surfing white caps on neon green longboards while wear ing banana-colored board shorts. Submarines chasing cruise ships, but only to play tag. Sharks luring sunburned, overprivileged men into the waves with shredded currency, only to use them to flavor their soup.

Then suddenly I awoke on my ragged 18th Street Surf Shop towel.

The sun was almost down and the breeze smelled of coconuts at this inappropriate latitude. My parents and siblings had left to re turn to the condo, presumably. I felt sandy, sweaty, blistered, blissed. Confused and slightly weak-kneed, I slowly braved the still-scald ing sand with my feet now bare. Somehow I had become separated from my shoes, with no idea how or when I had lost them. To this day, I still wonder. Perhaps those orange-trimmed New Balances became kin to all the single sneakers seen on the side of so many country highways.

I definitely wanted—no, needed—to buy a bike of my own. I just didn’t know where to find one like that. Would any old seller suffice? Could I ride alone, without sunshades or hippie friends, and still see the sea from above, without wings or fuel?

LYNN AND ANN, 2022 Abigail Cook

ARTIST STATEMENT

In 2018, Alyssa walked by an ailing butterfly on the side walk. She revived the little creature using sugar water and pa tience. Months later, Alyssa was in a medically-induced coma from which she never awoke. Each time her friends and family came across a butterfly, they remembered her; her smile and kindness and light and joy. This painting captures Sam, her high school friend and my identical twin sister, spending time with Alyssa in the only mortal way possible.

The piece is influenced by the concept of pixelation, how modern technology has reduced the need for traditional aca demic painting. The pixels distort the scene to make it a cap tured memory; almost real, but not quite tangible. This notion aligns with grieving the loss of a person–at some point the memories fade into these minute bits and pieces of a night to gether or a ride in the car or a day at The park. You strive and struggle for the full picture, but it feels broken. Each impasto stroke on the canvas is a mental battleground for the full pic ture, for the fading moments, for the lost soul.

LYNN AND ANN, 2022 Abigail Cook

UNSTRUCTURED: A STORY OF INJUSTICE IN NORTH CAROLINA PRISONS

I thought of Socrates when I saw Mouse’s mugshot plastered on the six a.m. news for killing a prison guard at Bertie Correctional Institution the night before. Socrates, the disgraced scholar who once taught a handful of thinkers that “people who have been harmed are bound to become more unjust.” This simple truth became a cadenced mantra as I contemplated why one of my best friends would brutally murder someone.

I met Mouse in 2004 while housed at Central Prison, a maxi mum custody facility. Both convicted of first-degree murder in our early twenties, we began serving life without parole, with eons of existence to spare. The only feature distinguishing us was our skin color—his white, mine black. Violent circumstances did not allow us to become good friends then, only years later, after the ills of time had hunched our backs with the weight of hopelessness. Pris on officials transferred Mouse to another institution one year into his sentence, after a prisoner assaulted him while he sat on the toi let. I remained at Central Prison for five more years.

We reunited in 2012 at Nash Correctional, a medium custody facility. Years of solitude helped Mouse master his skills as an artist. He spent a lot of time locked in his cell drawing portraits for com

Phillip Vance Smith, II

mission. On sunny days, we took walks around the prison yard and reflected on our once bright futures that were now reduced to dark desolation. During those walks, I discovered his brilliance. Mouse articulated informed opinions on most subjects. We did not always agree, but we listened to each other, and that is sometimes all one can ask of a friend. As we grew closer, my admiration metamor phosed into pity. We had served about the same amount of time, but my life in prison had been much easier because Mouse’s white skin ironically made him a target for bullying and guaranteed that he would never find peace behind prison walls.

While walking one day, Mouse explained that a woman wrote to him claiming to be his sister. After months of correspondence, Mouse learned that he had family living in the Midwest. They were good people, he said. They wanted to hire an attorney to challenge his conviction. None of his other family kept in contact. I envied Mouse’s happiness in those days. A granule of hope acted as manna for the hopeless, and at that point, he had more hope than me. But years later, after Mouse had been transferred again—after another prisoner picked a fight with him—I cringed to see his face on the morning news. No attorney. No release. No hope.

Men gathered around me in a convocation of sleepy eyes and morning breath to gawk at Mouse on television. Some of my friends remembered him from his time at Nash. Mouse was quiet, they de clared. Never bothered a soul. Their words painted an accurate picture of him, which depressed me even more. The news story ran a few times, reporting that police had charged Mouse with murder, but newscasters offered no details of his guilt. Because I had served time at numerous prisons, I knew that modern institutions relied on surveillance cameras to monitor activity in cell blocks. Author ities had probably gathered some concrete evidence against him. My shoulders slumped with this realization

Socrates inquired of Polemarchus, “And what about human be ings, comrade; shouldn’t we say that, when they are harmed, they become worse with respect to human virtue?”

I imagined causes for the incident, but no matter what I en visioned, I could not find justification. Mouse had already served fifteen years for murder. Although I did not know what created the situation, I refused to take sides. The atrocities of savage officers that I witnessed in prison reminded me of humanity’s imperfections. But adversity offered no excuse, and I loathed what he had

done. What bothered me most was thinking that the hopeless pris on environment could have driven him to commit such a crime. Apart from unknown specifics of the incident, my experiences told me that the culture of violence in North Carolina prisons contrib uted to Mouse’s barbaric actions.

Some believe prisoners deserve to live in violent environments because of the crimes they have committed. They might ask, why should legislators make changes in criminal sentencing to decrease prison violence? Sporadic violence in prison surprises no one, yet the severity of recent incidents in North Carolina prisons presents a deviation from the norm. The deaths of five correctional officers in 2017 offers a glimpse into the brutality that is destroying insti tutions, due in part to North Carolina’s criminal legislation which imposes extreme, long-term sentences.

This failed system of structured sentencing means that North Carolina institutions foster hopelessness instead of hope, which leads to prison violence. The history of structured sentencing in North Carolina began in the late 1970s when the state prison population hovered at around 15,000—it is now around 67,000. The Fair Sentencing Act of 1979 was passed to increase “truth in sentencing,” meaning that a prisoner should not be released unrea sonably early on parole. The act collided with a recent spike in con victions caused by the War on Drugs.1 Limited capacity prevented North Carolina prisons from adequately housing the overflowing prison population.2

Officials packed institutions tighter, welding bunk beds three high to keep up with the overflow. In retaliation, prisoners filed federal lawsuits challenging their conditions of confinement. The courts agreed that something needed to change and threatened to commandeer control of prisons if the state did not act. Lawmakers rushed to craft legislation that met the court’s ruling.

Meanwhile, the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Adviso ry Commission (NCSPAC) crafted a sentencing grid that assigned a mandatory minimum and maximum sentence to every crime. The proposed law proved an easy sell to lawmakers after one brutal inci

1 Thomas W. Ross and Susan Katznelson, “Crime and Punishment in North Carolina: Severity and Costs Under Structured Sentencing,” Federal Sentencing Reporter 11, no. 4 (1999): 207.

2 Ronald F. Wright, “Counting the Cost Of Structured Sentencing in North Carolina, 1980-2000,” Crime and Justice 29, (2002): 48.

dent guaranteed its success: In 1993, a man who was released from prison after serving two years of a six-to-ten-year prison term mur dered the father of basketball star Michael Jordan in eastern North Carolina.3 Public outcry following this tragedy gave lawmakers the opportunity to enact the most prejudicial and extreme crime bills: during seven weeks in February and March 1994, legislators intro duced over 400 new crime bills. The addition of life without parole and lengthy sentences for habitual felons promised the public that most violent offenders would die in prison for their crimes.

As a result, a prison boom began shortly after the Structured Sentencing Act passed in 1994. New institutions were constructed across the state in rural counties. NCSPAC accurately projected ris ing levels in prison population and planned how to deal with them twenty years in advance. Based on those predictions, legislators al located money to gradually increase prison capacity to reflect pro jected growth.

In the years immediately following the passage of the Struc tured Sentencing Act, other states regarded North Carolina as a model for prison reform. In 1997, NCSPAC was given the Innova tions in American Government award from the Ford Foundation. But what attracted accolades for lawmakers brought desolation to those trapped in the system. The new law operated as intended. However, its success produced another result: the hopelessness of long-term prisoners, victimized by the resulting culture of violence in overpacked and turbulent prisons.

My story in prison did not begin when I met Mouse in 2004. My privileged upbringing thrust me through all-white, upper-mid dle class communities where the biggest urban crisis was a threat from the homeowner’s association of removing a swing set from the backyard. My mother and stepfather worked as engineers. Their high-paying jobs forced us to move so often that I attended three high schools before my sophomore year. Low self-esteem marred my youth. Unable to fit in with my peers, I dropped out of high school. Years of drug usage and petty crime left me homeless after my parents tired of my antics. At the age of twenty-one, I landed headfirst at Polk Youth Center in September 1999 for a bevy of fel onies like larceny and possession of a stolen firearm. Chock-full of nineteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, Polk Youth Center seemed the

Robert F. Wright

most volatile prison in the state. I witnessed a fight every day, and the primary catalyst was poverty.

Inmate work assignments were limited. In spite of most jobs paying only forty-cents-a-day, prisoners coveted them like Cor vettes. Not only did jobs help financially, but they also gave a pris oner something to do. Those who did not work sat idly in cell blocks all day and survived off of money provided by family—if they were lucky enough to have a family that cared and was financially able to contribute. Many youthful offenders lacked stable support systems. Underprivileged prisoners either learned how to live with less, or extorted someone else. Bullies chose targets based on ap parent weakness. Most targets were slim white men—the prison minority—like my friend Mouse. Sometimes a target fought back, for pride. If they lacked confidence to fight, they tied a sock around a Master Lock. They broke off bits of metal from floor fans or bed springs to sharpen into shanks. They snuck up behind the bully and beat him senseless before he could defend himself.

Prison officials encouraged violence by challenging petrified men to confront their bullies instead of removing the victim from harm. Persuading young men to kill each other was a game that Polk prison guards played often. Guards only acted officially in the aftermath by sending offenders to the hole. Sadly, most of those brutal young men were released into society much more violent than when they entered prison.

The prison system provided me with no meaningful opportu nities for self-improvement before my projected release date. Re quired classes like, “Thinking for a Change” proved superficial and were taught by uneducated prison staff who canceled more classes than they instructed. Upon graduation, the prison awarded me an unaccredited certificate, but I had acquired no job skills.

Released in December 2000, I stumbled back into the same homelessness that had afflicted me before incarceration. I carried less than four dollars in my prison-issued pockets when I walked out a free man. No home. No job. No money. Little hope. I began dealing marijuana and cocaine the day after my release. I needed a home. I needed clothes. And I needed to eat.

Less than ninety days later, I was arrested for first-degree mur der following what newspapers dubbed a drug deal gone bad. I could not blame the state for my actions—I alone acted impulsively—but I could point to The Structured Sentencing Act as a major

contributor to the desperate situation that carved my path back to prison. After a week-long trial, I was convicted and sentenced to life without parole in March of 2002.

The prison system I returned to a little over a year after leaving had grown worse. Now twenty-three, I was processed at Central Prison, where I met Mouse. General population housed about two hundred men. One-third were serving life without parole and the rest virtually the same, with consecutive sentences amounting to fifty years or more. Black men under the age of thirty accounted for seventy-five percent of the population.

Similar to Polk Youth Center’s population, many prisoners housed in Central Prison came from poor families that could not afford to send money. Likewise, a correctional officer’s low-wage salary made illegal endeavors enticing. These two conditions cre ated a tornado of opportunity that made the drug trade thrive. The main factor was an endless prison term.

North Carolina ramped up prison construction again in the early 2000s—building five close-custody prisons for an average cost of ninety million dollars—These prisons served as gladiator schools for long-term prisoners where gangs fought their way to glory. Each faction was determined to control the drug trade, and willing to kill for it. An unaffiliated hustler either paid a tax to sell drugs or was forced to quit. Rebellion against gang law guaranteed violence.

Many of my friends joined gangs. Affiliation gave depressed men a sense of brotherhood while separated from loved ones. The camaraderie of gang life combatted hopelessness by giving prison ers the familial bonds and support they lacked.

To destroy a man, steal his hope. Lock him in a cage and tell him that he will never get out, no matter how much he changes. Fine him ten dollars for walking down the hallway with his shirt untucked. Suspend the Pell Grant program, which provides higher education, to keep him ignorant. Remove law libraries from pris ons to prevent challenges to the unjust laws and courts that keep him caged. Transfer him three hundred miles from home to stop his family from visiting. Charge him two dollars for a fifteen-min ute phone call, but pay him less than three dollars a week. Remind him that he is worthless every single day of his life. Such negative realities are not conducive to positive moral change, and cannot be expected to produce positive people. Though outraged, no prison-

er in North Carolina was surprised to see Mouse on the news for murdering a guard. His identity does not matter. Mouse’s actions represent what every prisoner knew was bound to happen.

I believe changes can be made to combat the violent culture of hopelessness created in North Carolina prisons. First, lawmak ers should consider merit-based parole for lifers and virtual lifers. Such an addition could only give prisoners pause before commit ting a heinous act of violence. Similar changes have already made a positive difference elsewhere. The District of Columbia introduced its Incarceration Reduction Act (IRAA) to great success in three phases: in April 2017, prisoners who were sixteen or seventeen when convicted became eligible for parole after twenty years; in May 2019, that 20-year requirement was shortened to 15; and in August 2019, the law was expanded to include prisoners who were up to age 25 when they were tried and convicted.4 The IRAA pres ents a common-sense alternative to life without parole that allows a prisoner to work toward release by positive deeds and good be havior. North Carolina’s adoption of such a law would significantly reduce violence by instilling a sense of responsibility and hope in prisoners who otherwise have none.

Lastly, North Carolina should make a serious investment in higher education for prisoners, specifically liberal arts bachelor’s degrees that teach critical thinking to broken men who need to restructure their responses to adversity. The Federal Bureau of Prisons found that “the more education received the less likely an individual is to be re-arrested or re-imprisoned.” Specifically, the Bureau found that those who achieve a high school diploma or GED have less than a 54.6% recidivism rate, those with an asso ciate’s degree, less than 13.7%, those with a bachelor’s degree, less than 5.6%, and for those with a master’s degree, 0%.5 Investment in higher education can be an investment in the future of North Carolina.

I wish I had been with Mouse before he acted that day. Maybe I could have calmed him by whispering, “we don’t have to act like an

4 Matt Clark, “The Sentencing Project Issues Report on Reducing Excessive Punishment for Violent Crimes,” Prison Legal News, Lake Worth Beach, FL; Human Rights Defense Center, October 2019, 4041.

5 Jeff Isabell-Taylor, “Education Key to Lower Recidivism Rates,” Guild Notes 43 no.2/3 Summer/Fall (2018), 21.

imals because they treat us like animals.” Then again, words might not have stopped him. Words may extinguish a candle’s flickering flame but to combat the pressures spawned by the hopelessness in prison would be like flinging an ice cube into a forest fire. Over the years, Mouse had been assaulted by many prisoners just as hope less as him. Only the mercy of hope could have given him pause to think about his actions—a hope that life without parole and struc tured sentencing did not give him. Mouse killed someone and will pay dearly. This narrative may satisfy some for the time being, but the culture of violence in prisons did not begin with Mouse, and it will not end after his conviction.

THE VIRUS

Juan Francisco Mejia

The criminal is an essential part of society. It is a much-needed tool in any town, city, and nation. The world needs a bad guy. Society needs the criminal more than it needs pastors and churches. There would be no police, preachers, politicians, if not for the criminal. Who would the senator fearmonger about to get you to vote for him, who would the lawyer defend, who would the cop chase, who would the enormous criminal justice system process? Who would you point at to call yourself good? You need me. But the truth is more complicated—society builds its prisons away from itself. So ciety wants to hide those titillating “bad” people, and make believe they don’t exist. But they do, and I’m one of them.

The bad guy is not born bad—“criminality” is not innate. Vio lence and hate are viruses that we spread knowingly and unknowing ly. I caught the virus myself in a prison that I called home for many years, in the dusty arsenic-laced land of the Kern Valley, California’s manure pond. Miles and miles of fruit, almonds, and all the vege tables you can think of. Billions of dollars in agriculture, yet driv ing through the streets you see nothing but stray dogs, lost-looking children and men, a liquor store and a church on every corner. You

can get shit-faced drunk and repent on the same block. Poor people and our resourcefulness.

Kern Valley State Prison was my home. I lived in Q block, cell 104. There, my celly was mixing the mustard-smelling tar heroin, and my butt cheeks were squeezed together in anticipation. The urge to shoot up was so bad I was turtle-heading. I lunged over to the toilet and yanked the courtesy curtain closed. “Hurry the fuck up!” I yelled. As soon as I said it, a small dark hand appeared under the curtain with a syringe full of heroin. Sweet relief. I was a professional and could shoot up without even tying off. I pressed the nee dle against my skin and slipped it into a vein, emptying the plunger. It was warm and wonderful, starting from my feet and vibrating its way across my body. I wiped and stood up. When I turned, I saw a face in my four-inch by two-and-a-half-foot security window. The guy smiled. He had a missing tooth and always reminded me of Roger Rabbit, “What’s up, vato?” I said. The guy actually was called Rabbit, and he was a runner. He sold drugs in prison and got a cut from his suppliers, guys like me. I had been doing business with him for over a year. The market was good, dope that cost five dollars in the streets was worth a hundred in prison. I would get drugs to his girl, who would pass them along to him, he’d sell and bring me the cash, and I’d return his cut. I made good money; he used most of his. Rabbit was a 35-year-old man who’d spent most of his life in juvenile hall, then the youth authority, and finally, in prison. He had bad ADHD and schizophrenia. He seemed different today. He was high, but it wasn’t that. When Rabbit was high he was the happiest guy around. He looked into my eyes and I saw it before he said it. “I’m gone.”

“What you mean, ese?” I asked.

“Fuck dog, I fucked up. My bitch lost a half ounce of black, and that shit belonged to that foo Diamond and you know that foo ain’t gonna let that go.” Rabbit looked like all the air had been sucked from him.

“How much is that?” I asked.

“Naw, you ain’t gotta do that shit. I fucked up, I’ll handle it,” Rabbit said and pulled out a prison shank. “I’m gonna do that foo before he does me.” Lifeless, defeated, scared, and angry, he looked like a demon had possession of him.

“Hey foo, don’t trip. I got you. You my boy, that ain’t shit. I’ll talk to that foo.” I said, feeling good. Heroin made the whole world

feel small. I felt like anything was possible.

“Contreras! Find your fuckin’ cell.” The CO yelled through the loudspeaker.

The next morning the doors opened for breakfast and I saw Diamond, who lived in cell 101. I caught up to the massive man, his eyes red from the weed he constantly smoked. “I gotta holla at you about some serious shit.” I said.

Diamond took a step back and I felt his body language turn defensive. “Naw blood, it ain’t even like that.” I said, and I began explaining the situation while we walked towards the chow hall. Surprisingly, Diamond was understanding. We agreed that I would send him a thousand dollars, and he would squash the deal he had with Rabbit.

Satisfied, I headed over to work. I was a barber at the prison, though I couldn’t cut hair if my life depended on it. I walked to cell 110, where Rabbit lived, and pulled him out for a haircut. Once outside, I told him what went down with Diamond. “That’s fucking firme, but what do you want for it?” Rabbit asked.

“Look foo, I ain’t tripping, but you gotta make it right with me. Just give me the half ounce you were supposed to get to him. Can you do that?” I asked, and we were both suddenly serious.

“Aight, I can do that,” he answered, and we went back to doing what most convicts do in prison, nothing. Just talking shit and get ting high whenever we can.

A few days passed and early one morning I heard the CO knocking on my door. It was only 5 A.M. and there were no pro grams going yet. I opened my eyes, “What’s up?”

“You got a brother in prison?” she asked.

“Yeah, but he’s in High Desert.”

She smiled. “No he ain’t. 1 block.”

“What the fuck!”

“I know we’re on lockdown, but I’ll take you to the chow hall to see him.” I couldn’t believe my luck, I almost began to cry. I hadn’t seen my brother in 10 years.

A week went by and Rabbit got hold of some meth. He sent me a couple of grams. I didn’t say anything because I was still hoping he’d make it right.

Two weeks later, Rabbit hit on some heroin for another guy and sent me a gram. Once I was able, I got a hold of him to discuss what he owed me. He was clearly loaded. His eyes were almost

closed, he was so high. “So where’s my shit, Rabbit?”

“Hey foo, I got you. You know I’m good for it, I just need a little more time.” Rabbit tried to sound convincing in the way all addicts do, not knowing they never fool anyone.

I acquiesced because I considered him a good acquaintance. In prison, you can never call anyone your friend. A man can kill someone for you; can share his food, soap, and clothes with you; when you’re threatened he can pick up a knife and win or lose with you, but you still can’t call him a friend. Prison damages trust. Most criminals will scrutinize the actions of the people around them for the rest of their lives, no matter how well they’re treated.

A few days later, I called my family to check in and learned they were planning a trip to come and see me and my brother that week end. It was a beautiful thing to hear—visits keep you alive in prison. They help your heart stay open and strong. Getting to see my broth er and the rest of my family was one precious gift after the next.

Soon enough it was Saturday morning, the day of the visit. I decided to shave to look nice for them, but because level 4 inmates aren’t allowed to keep razors in their cells, I had to find someone who had stolen one previously and stowed it away. I remembered I’d seen a razor in Rabbit’s cell, and as we were walking back from chow I hollered at him, “Hey foo, let me use your razor?”

Rabbit looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite place. “Yeah don’t trip. I got you foo.” He called back, and he slowed his pace so we could walk together to his cell. The COs stood about ten feet away. We reached his cell, 110, which he kept dark by cov ering his light. Next to him in 109 lived my old celly, Danny. I start ed a conversation with him about something or other—probably drugs—when suddenly I felt heat on my right cheek, then against my forehead, down my right eye, to my lips. I didn’t realize what was happening, but then I saw Rabbit run toward the COs and re alized everyone was staring at me. I was confused, but then I saw Danny’s pale face and I knew. I touched my cheek, and it was wet. When I pulled my fingers away they were covered in blood. The alarm sounded, and the COs shouted, “GET DOWN! GET DOWN!” But I didn’t get down. My mind was blank and racing. I walked in a daze back to my cell and grabbed a bandana, which I pressed to my face. The cuts were already swollen from the dirty blade. I stepped out of the cell and finally lowered myself to the ground. Rabbit had already been escorted out of the building

by the COs, some of whom then walked over to me and asked if I needed a wheelchair. I said, “I’m good.” But I wasn’t. In prison, when you get hurt—whether stabbed, beat up, or ill— you can’t take the wheelchair when the COs fetch you. Everyone loses re spect for you. That was the absent thought on my mind as my eyes began to cloud over.

What I was feeling was unlike anything I’d known in my life. It was a violation, and it was personal. This was the man I had helped out of a jam. I’d paid his debt as a favor, I hadn’t threatened him when he didn’t square up. Well that was a mistake. He fucked with the wrong motherfucker. I wanted to hurt him, but I had to be care ful. I could lose contact with him and ruin my business. In prison, if you stab someone or get stabbed, you’re separated from them for ever, considered enemies. I just wanted to hurt him for what he did to me.

I arrived at the prison’s medical department and the COs had already called the goon squad (gang investigators) to interrogate me. “What happened? Why did he do this to you? We already know what’s going on, so you better just tell us.” In prison, no matter what happens, you never involve the pigs, but at that moment I wanted to hurt Rabbit however I could. This felt like a good option, so I threw away my prison morality. I didn’t care if I was found out. I would deal with that when I had to. But CO justice wasn’t enough. I needed to dole out revenge myself.

They transported me to the hospital, and as soon as I got there I was ushered into the doctor’s office. The people around stared at me like I was something horrific. I tried to pull the craziest look possible. Fuck ‘em. If they looked at me like that, I’d act like that. Once in the office, the doctor explained that he could take his time with some careful suturing to make my face heal as cleanly as possi ble, or he could use staples, which might leave more scarring.

“I don’t give a shit. Just do it.” I nearly barked.

He put what looked like a dog’s flea collar around my face, grabbed the skin, and stapled it together. He put some glue on the cuts. I was driven back to the prison and taken to speak to the cap tain. I sat down in her small office handcuffed.

“Today’s your lucky day,” she said. “Usually you’d go off to the hole after an incident like this, but I went and spoke to your mom. I have kids too, so I’ll let you slide on this. I know it wasn’t your fault, but I still can’t let you get your visit. That sound good?”

Punished by a dealer for helping him out, punished by the pris on for getting cut. My family traveled all this way to see me, and were now being sent back.

“Yeah whatever. Can I go back to my cell?”

“Yeah, get out of here.”

I stormed back to my cell, my face throbbing, my fists clench ing along with it. My celly, a small guy, was staring at me, silent, and although he didn’t say anything, I knew he felt like a bitch because he hadn’t helped me. I said nothing to him, just took the sheet off my mattress and looked for the hole I had made in it until I found what I was looking for: a big flat piece of metal I had gotten from someone in the kitchen. I told my celly to keep point and began to sharpen it. The task focused me. It felt difficult and rewarding, like I was working toward a goal. It took me a few hours to get it sharp enough.

The next day I went to work with my face bandaged up. A lot of people stared, but I was glad. “What the fuck you lookin’ at, punk?”

I hurled at anyone who looked my way, hoping they’d say some thing back and give me an excuse to hurt them.

Later that day, my little brother sent me a kite from 1 block and told me that he felt that Danny, my old celly, should have helped me. That was what I needed—that sealed the deal. I had a cure, a di rection for the maddening hate and desire for vengeance inside me. I was in the dayroom working. I called out to the tower officer and told him to pull out cell 109 for a haircut. The door slowly opened, and Danny came to the door confused.

“What’s up?” He asked. The tower officer had left. “Come out here and kick it,” I said, and Danny began to move toward me but he must have felt it. He stopped. I pulled out the knife and said, “What’s up, puto? Come here, I’ma fuck you up.”

His eyes darted everywhere, but in prison there’s rarely a some where to run to. He put hands in front of his body and looked into my eyes. At that moment something shifted. I knew suddenly that it wasn’t Danny. It wasn’t Rabbit, it wasn’t anyone. It was violence itself that had me feeling the way I was. This was how violence had managed to live so long, it was passed down from victim to victim, and me hurting Danny would only continue the cycle. So I chose not to. I was going to stop myself from passing this virus to some body else. I put the knife back in my pocket and told Danny, “Get outta here.” I packed up my barber kit and headed back to my cell. I

broke the shiv into three pieces and flushed them in my toilet. My celly asked me what happened and I tried to explain what I now understood.

Several years after this affair, I was called to the program office at Kern Valley State Prison and informed I was being sent to the hole—temporary, non-punitive. In the cage was another inmate, a guy named Tricks. We got to talking, and it turned out that Rab bit did the same thing to him at a different prison. We were being held in the hole because Rabbit was being transferred back to Kern Valley, and since he was EOP (mentally ill), he had priority. They were moving the guys he’d had conflicts with. Everything was going normally; we were just waiting to get called to go to D yard that night. Hours passed and the COs came around to pick up all the guys going to A yard, then B, then C yard, where Rabbit was. They came to our door and called to Tricks, “Come on out.” To me they said, “Contreras, get ready to leave next.”

Tricks went to the door and asked, “Wait—where am I going?”

“You’re going to C yard.” the CO replied. Tricks turned around and mouthed to me, “They fucked up.”

Two days later I was in the dog kennels, our yard, when I heard an alarm go off. A few minutes later, I heard a helicopter overheard. Someone was getting life-flighted to the hospital. That night, a voice in the pod shouted, “INCOMING”—a new guy coming to the hole. I got out of my bunk and peeked out the window to see Tricks. He caught my eye and winked. Later, I found out that Tricks had stabbed Rabbit so many times he’d left him near-paralyzed.

And this is what I understood that day I let Danny go: stabbing him wouldn’t have made me feel better, because that wasn’t the comfort I needed. If I’d stabbed him, he might have felt what I felt, and done the same thing. This is the thing about criminals, we have stared morality down, have done bad and known good. You can’t know hot without cold. And maybe there are degrees of knowing, But if you know goodness yourself you don’t need to point at oth ers and say, “he is bad, and he is not me, so therefore I must be good.” I know that when I stopped myself from stabbing Danny I did good, permanent good because he will never feel what I felt. At least, not by my hands. I am a criminal who has been behind bars for twenty three years because I killed someone. I’ve known good and bad, but I have never had to point at anyone else to call myself good. I know by experience, by doing.

MALINA

Elizabeth Hawes

200 children stolen on July 1, 1944. Those left behind hidden in Lithuanian crevices, under floor boards, in holes. Polish, Russian, Lithuanian forest berries, “malinas”— now whispered code for secret, hidden spaces where concealed children, waiting for the Red Army, lay still, days at a time in 100 degrees beneath SS feet. Decades later, he plods up attic stairs. Teary-eyed and shaky to the attic with small window. Window where he saw another little Jewish boy shot in the head with a finger flick. Body left in the square, unburied. Screaming machine guns and dogs. Weeping mothers. He wiped his eyes, saying, under loose planks my mother saves me. The stairs never leave. I see them when I dream. At a stoplight. Making a meal. Still I lay still under floor boards. Still.

WORDLOVE’S ELEGY

Prisoner Poet #BJ0177

I expected rape and it’s quite simple: I am in prison. Look at me: pretty, petite—seek no more than a bed my body: a back-alley-in-wait.

Eyes unravel me. Lies, and time spent in showers: the stranger’s candy. Hope is also simple.

Then, suddenly you became me: handsome fire, Dreamer-in-Lava, blaze of audacity, the snake that is hidden & one that dreams in summer leaves, my feet made fear shoeless and two hells made heaven.

Mortal muse, Blazentine we fuse

I am stopped, as love breathes smooth and wet, I am not in control.

Your emptiness completes my void. Then, guards escort you but don’t return you.

My brain turns a cage. This heart: piled dead doves.

Love’s not stopped at the prison gates, is not life extinct is not fatal fruit, is not an idol is not even a blue ship cutting briskly upon its death-mask.

Does love upset you? Does its intelligence outsmart you? Do I surprise you because you cage my skin but I still, like germs, spread life. I love you & it is simple: without you, I expect rape.

BREATH OF FRESH AIR

David Steece

I was in prison when my youngest son was born. I remember how it felt coming home from prison and taking him in my arms: it was like holding a breath of fresh air. I was fascinated by the newness of life, the optimism, the promise of hope in him. He wore hope like a smile, right down to his peanut toes and his Buddha belly. He carried hope like water to a dying man, and I had been dying for a while. But by the time he was eight years old the hope had vanished, and I was off again; this time to serve a life sentence.

There is a metric researchers use to predict the likelihood of a child ending up in prison. Children accrue points for factors like wit nessing violence, experiencing physical or sexual abuse, or having a parent in prison. The test takes an inventory of a child’s young life, crunches the numbers, and feeds it into an algorithm to determine if they will be a criminal.

I first heard about this metric a few years ago, while watching a documentary. I lay on my bunk in the dark as they systematically broke trauma down into categories and subcategories. They showed examples, graphs, charts, and projections while I melted into my bed. They used words like generational and environmental. I held

my breath as they drew a line linking the hurts of my childhood directly to the bunk I lay on. They continued on, linking my own kids to bunks of their own. I lay there in the dark weighed down by statistics and probabilities, and began tracing lines of my own.

I traced a line from the bloody brawl I had with my drunken stepfather in the basement of my mother’s house as my son stood watching. His eyes were frozen in fear and wide enough to fall through, and I carried that line on through our phone calls from county jail, when he would ask me how old he would be when I came home. The line reached the office down the hall where I sat on the phone talking to that same little breath-of-fresh-air as he sat in some office down some other hall, somewhere in the prison he was in, and I wondered where his line would go from there.

I did my first stretch of solitary confinement at fourteen years old when I was “grounded” to my room for the entire summer. It was there I learned what it meant to be powerless.I didn’t leave my room for months, imprisoned by fear and haunted by my own de mons. This was long before there were things like cell phones, com puters, or TVs in bedrooms. What I remember most was the un relenting, sweltering heat. The house would empty out during the day, and I would open the door no more than a few inches, careful not to cross the invisible line that was drawn with fear and faithfully enforced by my stepfather whether he was there or not. I would lay on my back, sipping at the fresh air as it floated across my doorway like wisps of freedom, wishing that I could turn to smoke and float away on its back. I remember how lonely, small, and cruel the world became as the months melted away in the summer heat. I would fly into silent, soul-cleansing fits of rage, smashing my face into the carpet to scream out in despair. I eventually ran out of things to break, forcing me to turn my aggression upon myself, doling out crushing, well-placed blows to my fragile self-esteem, only wanting the numbness to go away.

My childhood imprisonment ended abruptly when I was granted a one-day pass to go fishing with my stepfather and my uncle, who was a gentle giant. I was grateful for the freedom and wandered off on my own. When they found me, I had climbed to a high point on the riverbank where I had a perfect, happy, little family pinned down on the ledge below me. I loosened rocks and kicked them over the edge while they scrambled for safety. I’ll nev

er forget my uncle towering above me, asking me “Why?” with eyes wet from tears and a face red from the shame of apologies given to strangers. The perfect, happy, little family gathered up their picnic and headed back to their perfect, happy, little home as I returned to my den of fear and violence. How could I ever have explained to my uncle that I didn’t want to hurt them, I only wanted to feel powerful for a moment?

I know what it’s like to have the life knelt out of you, to be pinned under the weight of terror, crying helplessly out for a mother who cannot save you. But I also know what it’s like to spend a lifetime kneeling on the necks of others, to make you feel bigger than you are. I was once a racist, a skinhead, and the leader of a white supremacist gang. I’ve learned the cycles of hate and violence that swirl and flow through life, connecting each of us, one to the other, knee to neck in an endless struggle of power and oppression.

Once I started seeing those lines, it became hard not to. When I was older I had a homeboy who was wild in the eyes, young and violent. He was small, 175 pounds of seething anger. He looked at me with such respect that it was hard for me to maintain eye con tact. He had the name of our gang tattooed across his forehead above his left eyebrow and wrapped around his neck in three-inch letters just in case there was any doubt. His favorite place to be was under my feet. We were walking to the rec yard one day, and he told me this story.

He said that when he was a boy, his dad took him fishing along the river a few days after coming home from prison. He was so excited. It was going to be their special day of reconnecting and spending lost time together.

His dad was drinking that day, and by the time afternoon came around, he was so drunkhe could hardly walk. He stumbled off along the riverbank with his fishing pole and my friend entertained himself as kids do, playing and waiting, and waiting some more. But his dad didn’t return. At some point he started calling for him, yell ing as loud and as far as his little voice would carry. Fear and anxiety welled up inside him, driving him into a panic as he screamed again and again for his father. As darkness fell, he attempted to search for his father, venturing out as far as fear would allow before running back to the safety of the locked car, doing that over and over. He huddled up beside the car in the dark, listening to the sounds of na

ture creep in around him. He spent that night curled up on the hard ground, cold and alone, hungry, scared,and tired. When dawn final ly broke, he walked down to the river and found his father. He was face down, floating along the riverbank, tangled in tree branches.

I think a lot about my little homeboy. I think about the anger that rested behind his eyes, gluing his heart together as he walked the same prison yard that his father had walked. I think about the fire that burned inside him, the pain written on his face, peeking out from behind gang tattoos as he told me that story. After my little homie got out, I heard he was stabbed to death on the streets of Spokane, Washington. I hold my breath when I think about him. His line was so short, drawn for him the day he found his father dead along the riverbank. I don’t know how to erase those lines once they’ve been drawn. All I can do is make room under my feet for wild-eyed youngsters.

I’m no longer a gang member. I guess I’m no longer a lot of things. I came to a point in my life where nothing made sense to me anymore. I’m still in prison, but today I speak out against things like hate, racism, and violence. Whenever I talk to the youngsters around me, I try to tell them that story, to give them something ugly and real to carry with them back to their bunks. I want them to imagine their own child, cold and hungry, screaming out for a father who floats face down in his addiction, tangled in the trauma of his own childhood.

Not long ago, I was working out with another youngster who was having a hard time. The mother of his children had disappeared, leaving their kids with her family, who were seeking custody. Be tween sets of pull-ups, I asked him how it was all going.

He looked at me with cold eyes and said, “I’m just pissed off that there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it. I don’t even know how to fight it.” He said, “All I do is sit on my bunk and stew on it trying not to explode on anyone.”

“There’s not a single moment in life that leaves you powerless,” I advised. He looked at me like I was stupid or hadn’t heard him. I said, “Just not exploding is a win. The only way you’ll ever be pow erless is if you give your power away.”

I spoke to him again the next day, and he had reached out to the family who wanted to take his kids from him. Things seem to have worked out: he’s going to sign a temporary custody order so he can

have them back when he gets home.

Sleep is hard to come by these days. It’s there in the quiet of the night that my heart will whisper to me. It was only a few weeks ago now, but it feels like a lifetime ago that I lay in the dark, using my eyes to trace the outlines of old stickers and photos that had once been glued to the bottom of the bunk above me. I couldn’t stop thinking about a phone call that I’d had with my son. I pulled my blanket up over my chin, tucking it tight so that I could feel the weight of it pressing against my body, holding me like the thin arms of a stranger. I closed my eyes and felt my heart squeezing in my chest, wringing its hands in hopelessness.

I drifted around in my mind remembering when my children were children, laughing and tumbling, blinded by innocence, crip pled with hope. I remembered sunburns and Sunday mornings, baseballs and bare feet, skateboards and skinned knees. I remem bered a little house filled with little dreams, and I turned and faced the wall to hide my tears. There is always a wall.

I know I built these walls around me. I remember placing every brick, chipping away at life, knocking the soft round edges into sharp corners, grinding and shaping it into blocks to stack one upon the other. I crawled on my belly in the filth to lay the foundations, standing on the back of my addiction to set the highest course. I ground fear and violence into a paste and wet it with the tears of strangers to mortar each brick into place. I set the final stone with the acrid smell of gunpowder pinching at my nose and a mother’s anguish filling the courtroom.

The fingers of a panic attack tightened its grip around my throat while I imagined my cell filling with water. It felt so real—pouring in under my door, pooling at my feet, slowly rising higher until I floated on my back, sipping at the last few inches of air trapped against the ceiling before losing the desperate struggle. I wonder if that water was the same tears that once filled the courtroom.

I lay there in the dark that night, replaying the phone call in my mind until I could no longer hear his words over the sounds of him chipping away, knocking the soft round edges out of his own life.

Not long after that call, a kid showed up at my unit. He trans ferred here from another prison and since the first time I saw him, he reminded me of my youngest son, my breath-of-fresh-air. The

kid just turned nineteen, but he looked closer to fifteen. He was rail thin and wide-eyed, never venturing far from his bunk. A quiet guy doing all he could to not look scared, but you can only do so much. He walked up to me a couple of days ago and asked me what my name was. He said that he was told to find me when he got here, that a good friend and ex-homeboy of mine had helped him get his transfer. He said this friend had even filled out his kite for him, and that had told him that I’d take care of him here.

I reached out and took his hand; his grip was small and frail like him. He said he’d only been in prison a couple of months, and that he has ten to twenty-five years to do.

The next day, I got five messages in a row saying “Call me! Call me, please!” Between deep, agonizing sobs I was told that my youngest son, my little breath-of-fresh-air, had died in a car wreck. The only thing I could feel was the coolness of the wall where I rest ed my forehead. I tumbled into nothingness. The world fell away, leaving me in an in-between place, between here and there, be tween right and wrong, between then and now.

I found myself standing at my locker next to my bunk with my head in my hands trying to breathe when I felt something heavy resting on my shoulder. I lifted my head to see my friend Bill stand ing next to me with his hand on my shoulder, asking me in a dis tant voice if I was okay. I turned to speak, but only a whisper came out—as if my son had become a secret, something so precious that I had to hide it away from the rest of the world. Bill leaned in close, and under theweight of his heavy hand, I whispered to him about my son. I whispered about hope and heartache. I whispered about karma. I whispered about a baby boy, fat, happy, and full of life. But most of all, I whispered about failure.

When Bill finally spoke, he whispered back to me as if he un derstood that I wasn’t ready to share my son with an undeserving world. He said, “The only way to get better is to heal others.” He whispered, “You need to put your thoughts and your energy into the people who need you.” As he spoke I looked at the new kid, curled up sleeping on his bunk across the way. He was a thin form tucked under his blanket, huddled up like a lost child.

I spent the next few days drowning in my cell once again, only this time they were my own tears. I couldn’t shake the emptiness. I kept screaming over and over inside my head until my silent voice was hoarse and strained. My heart shrunk away, hiding itself like a

wounded animal. My thoughts seemed to have thoughts of their own, filling my head with happy, crushingly sad memories. I felt numb, like I was wading through a world made of cotton. I couldn’t out-strength, out-think, or out-will the convulsing sobs that seized control of my body.

A few days later, I stepped outside myself. I woke the kid up out of his sleep. His eyes flipped open, wide with fear, as I stood over his bunk. I said, “Wake up, kid, and brush your teeth. You’re working out with me.”

He put his feet to the floor without question and followed me out to the rec yard. Between sets, I asked him if he had anyone on the outside taking care of him. He said, “I have a lady who’s like an adopted mom to me. I don’t have a dad, he left me when I was three.”

I stood there, sinking backwards in my mind. “I just lost my son a few days ago.”

At the end of the workout, I said, “Look, don’t worry, I got you. You just stay out of the drama, show up for every workout, check with me before you do anything stupid, and we’ll do this together.”

After twenty years in prison and a lifetime surrounded by death and betrayal, it becomes hard to do anything “together.” But I’ve seen so many guys turn to stone and sink away into a cold and empty existence. I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to turn to stone, and if I do sink, I don’t want to sink alone.

One night, many years ago in the maximum-security prison, I looked out the window of my cell and saw two little birds nestling up to each other in the coils of razor wire three feet away. It was cold and stormy outside, and I wondered what had brought them to my little piece of wire. Why were they not tucked away wherever it is that little birds tuck themselves away on cold and stormy nights? They faced in opposite directions with their little feathers fluffed against the cold, each with its head tucked under its wing. I watched for hours as they huddled close to each other, holding tight to their perch, squeezing that strand of frozen wire with all their might as the wind tugged and pushed at them. I watched helplessly, willing strength into their tiny bodies as the wind drove the rain against my window, shaking furiously at the wire as if intent on driving them from their perch. But together, they endured. I love the word, en dure. To weatherthe storm no matter how small and overwhelmed

you are. I found strength in those little birds, and I take strength anywhere I can find it.

Spring is here and I love the feel of it, the newness of life, the marking of time, the forward motion. I love the feel of new spring sunshine, thin and crisp, resting on my shoulders and wrapping me in possibility. I love walking the rec yard, lifting my eyes above the fence, breathing, thinking, feeling. I love to watch the birds as they swim through the air, flitting from perch to perch as if unsure what to do with the abundance of it all. This is the time of year when splashes of color start to appear in the grass: sprinkles of tiny flow ers pop up blue and purple, the size of clovers, delicately lifting to the sun. Sometimes I’ll stop just to watch the bees as they bum ble from flower to flower, poking their heads inside each one as if searching for lost treasure.

I’m still working out with the kid, and he’s starting to settle in. My heart kicks every time he looks me in the eye, lifting his chin to seem just a little taller. The other day I told him, “I know you have a long ways to go. I know how you’re feeling, but I promise you’ll be okay,” and I stopped myself just in time as the word “son” tried to jump from my tongue and settle in comfortably at the end of the sentence.

I look around and feel amazed at how different the world is to me today. I think about how narrow my world was when consumed by gangs, hate, and violence. There were so many times when I could have given up on myself, but I knew who I wanted to be. I knew that if I let go of my little place to stand, then the night would win, and I’d be swept away into oblivion. And whenever I feel myself turning to stone, I find a way to feel. I go out to my little place to stand, and I close my eyes, I wrap my heart in hope, and I think about life. I think about a world that must exist somewhere, somewhere out there beyond the fence line, a world with soft round edges where parents never have to outlive their children, where children never have to pull their father’s bodies from the river by the cuffs of their pants. Where children won’t have to carry their father’s legacy into cells of their own.

GURP

John Cochran

A couple of years ago, I began to hear a new word in the prison patois, one that was totally unfamiliar to me. Gurp. On any given day, walk ing around the yard, one was almost certain to hear one prisoner ask another, “Hey man, got any gurps?” I knew it was something to do with drugs, specifically pharmaceuticals, but I didn’t know which. I didn’t particularly care. In here, trouble sticks to drugs like hair on soap, and I had gotten all the trouble I needed a long time ago.

Then, Gurp evolved from a noun into a verb, “Check out TwoBit Tony, he sure is gurped out today,” and then into an adjective, whereby one could be “gurpified,” “gurptastic” or even “gurpali cious.” At this point, curiosity had forced me to sit up and pay at tention.

I remained ignorant of the etymology of gurp until last winter, when my buddy Roger and I were walking home from dinner after a snowstorm. We passed the pill line and noticed several dozen color ful piles of vomit in the snow. I mentioned that it appeared as though dinner had disagreed with a lot of people, and Roger informed me such was not the case. Then, he pointed to the pill window.

There was a new policy in place that required inmates leaving

the pill line to open their mouths, lift their tongues, and run their fingers around their gums while a ward examined them with a flash light. This was done to prevent inmates from hiding the pills and selling them later, as was commonly done. But inmates came up with a workaround anyway: swallow the pill and take no water with it. Leaving the pill line, step several feet around the corner of the building, and… GURP… up comes the pill. They puke it out.

I was fascinated and horrified. I knew that people cheeked their pills and spit them out after leaving the line. I knew about people swallowing bundles of dope in the visiting room and even sticking small packages up their rectums—but those are carefully sealed packets, this is a bare pill in a puddle of puke.

Prison is full of dope. Alongside the old standards—pot, coke, meth, heroin—that come in through guards and visitors, there are black market psychotropics issued to inmates in the pill line every day: Thorazine, Haldol, Elavil, Xanax, and others. Although the pharmacy doesn’t provide the ferris wheel of fun that street drugs do, there is a place on the midway for any head change in this circus of doom.

One in five inmates are taking prescription medication at the time of their imprisonment. The Department of Corrections owns its own pharmacy and is only too happy to give anyone in this miserable place a bit of chemical comfort. Make the people unhappy, offer a solution. It costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, but it provides the prison with a tidy profit and keeps the herds under control. The most recent trend in psych meds is Wellbutrin. It’s an antidepressant that the inmates seem to believe has a kick. They say it’s like snorting speed, though I think it’s more like wishful think ing. And yes, I did say snorting. Very few inmates swallow their pills. We shoot them, smoke them, and in the absence of a needle or matches, crush them up and snort them. It hits quicker and has more of a “back home” feel, I suppose.

The majority of the inmate population doesn’t have much money. Prison jobs pay in the neighborhood of $5 a month, and poverty being one of the biggest driving forces behind crime in this country means that people come in broke. The illegal drug trade helps. A Thorazine or Elavil tablet might fetch fifty cents to a dollar on the black market, but right now Wellbutrin is worth $10 per 300 milligram pill. An inmate getting two pills a day could earn $600 a month. And demand is insatiable.

It didn’t take long for word to get back to the administration that half the yard was snorting their (or someone else’s) Wellbutrin. To halt the secondary market, when dispensing Wellbutrin, nurses were ordered to crush the pills and float them in a cup of water. That caused two distinct problems. First, most inmates stopped taking their prescriptions. Their only need for the pills was finan cial, and crushing and dissolving them in water made reselling them impossible. Second, some of the pills were time-release, and crushing them negated the effect of the buffering compound in the tablets. With profits at the pharmacy flagging and depression ap parently worsening, administrators reversed their policy of crush ing the pills and Wellbutrin was back in business, although with new security procedures in place. Thus, gurping was born.

That night with Roger, I couldn’t help but more closely exam ine the frightful scene of varied colors and chunks in the pristine snow, representing the beverage choices of inmates at dinner: or ange, purple, red, blue, green, and yellow. In the deeper drifts where the snow had melted through to an appreciable depth, there were vomit holes and evidence of human beings excavating through the foul miasma of chilled regurgitant. I stood there like an idiot. Rog er said, “Yep, just like momma birds.” I nearly added to the scene when Roger pointed out several whole, unchewed peanuts and sug gested we might rinse them off and save them for a snack.

One thing about people here is we live rougher, riskier lives. We’re more prone to engage in dangerous, unhealthy behaviors like intravenous drug use and unprotected sex. Life is hard and we live it hard to make it work for us. In addition to being disgusting, there are medical reasons to avoid snorting something that someone else yakked up.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) thrives in tightly-packed populations like prisons. It is a so-called super brg because it spreads quickly and is difficult to treat, being resis tant to certain antibiotics. When a new prisoner arrives, he is put through two weeks of admission and orientation processing where he is repeatedly advised of the dangers of MRSA. There are video kiosks spooling cautionary lectures and signs posted in living areas that punctuate the lesson with frightening pictures and superflu ous exclamation marks. The slogan, “If it’s wet and it’s not yours… DON’T TOUCH IT!!!” is pounded into prisoner consciousness from day one.

But for some, the pull of gurps is stronger than the threat of MRSA. In prison, drug addicts often form cliques or co-ops where they can pool their drugs and share paraphernalia. Needles are hard to come by and lighters and matches are rare, so sharing makes sense. Sharing also means that if any one’s stash gets busted, he doesn’t have to go without. He has homies. But of course, nothing is clean, let alone sterile. So they might share a bad cold between them too, but that doesn’t stack up to the hurt of withdrawal. On the outside, this behavior is dangerous. In prison, the implications are ghastly.

Whether the vector was vomit or a snorting straw, we can never know. What we do know now is how quickly a MRSA staph infection can grow in an environment made almost exclusively of mucus membrane and soft tissue. When one clique returned from a trip to the hospital, each of them was missing pieces of their nose, lips, or face.

When an inmate undergoes a marked change in appearance— growing or shaving a beard, going from long hair to bald, new tat toos—he is required to have a new ID made. So dramatic were the changes in their facial characteristics, every one of them had to have a new picture taken. I think of it every time I walk past the pill line and see the bright, colorful snow that looks like a springtime flower garden blooming in the dead of winter.

THREE WORKS Kellen Stuhlmiller

Kellen Stuhlmiller

Kellen Stuhlmiller

THE ART OF MISTAKE

Demetrius Buckley

Fifth graders huddled goose-like around an empty juice-box. We played pick-em-up-mess-em before first period, tumbled in the grass like weed baggies or stretched out condoms. His nappy head and mine: him lookin’ like Unc’, me looking like a father, while never knowing a father. Then suddenly he became one, and vanished into twilight like heat rising. Me, him, the wavy distortion of spirit.

We dated the same girl: tall, glasses, left arm burnt which we said she got from reaching too far into the soul, where man is all lava churning. We joyrided in cars we stole strong-armed, her good arm hung out the busted window, sunbathing. What had us spent like shell casings was her pool of energy, so we threw hands by the orange lockers with hearts carved on them and initials under R.I.P. like song titles, not for her love or for bragging rights, but for how good of homies we were going to be in the future, sitting in the principal’s office complimenting each other’s right jabs and uppercuts.

Your cousin turned out to be my right hand when I saw breath as a flaw. He told me I had to stand in for you—taller with lighter skin, my toothprint in your crooked knuckle like sleep marks in the morning—because the night before, you and your youngest brother had played a game, one bullet: spin, click, spin.

Drunk off bumpy face after that girl we dated wanted out. Spin. spin. spin. Her arm digging. Click. click. click. Your youngest brother was only nine so you doubled your turn. Spin. click. click. spin. and he waited for the next. Click, click...

BRIDGE CARD HOLDER

Demetrius Buckley

You have insufficient funds at 11:52, again at 11:58. 12:01, you swipe Newports and Arizona Iced Tea, Everfresh Papaya Juice because you don’t like how gin burns when traveling solo down a dry throat. You seem to think of your child and snatch a red Blow Pop which, by morning, will end up stuck on the side of a carseat collecting fast food crumbs and dollar store weave, a ponytail on a stick.

At a distance, Chandler Park is a simple circle: one way in one way out. It reminds you of momma’s favorite line: niggas chase their own funky tails. You want him in deep circles, calendar events, when prenatal prescriptions boost your monthly funds with swollen breasts and thick thighs, under a shirt one size too big. Maybe this time it’ll be a girl and she’ll inspire the young boys up the street to catch her dreaming out the hood. You ignore momma when she say he gon’ be in prison or on a T-shirt posing the good lord’s death. She makes you think about that.

You put on a WIC renewal form, under the name of the girl’s father, incarcerated. Or deceased. The looks would be indefinite as you sit opposite the social worker. CPS on speed dial like Chinese One takeout, the place with the orange chicken soaked in sweet and sour sauce. Your social worker is curvy, her blue hair curled and she always excuses herself when the office phone rings. She got a baby too, you’ve noticed: his picture framed on her desk says her food stamps come every first of the month. You don’t know what box to check: deceased. Incarcerated. Extinct.

The night is in heat, the cars in front slow to show off. You know not to love him and all his power, his strap under the seat. You bet his momma was on welfare too, surviving the world made for man. Maybe the feeling will fade like the barcode on the back of a bridge card. Maybe he’ll survive the summer.

SHE’S A SHOOTER Corey Devon Arthur

ALL THINGS RELATIVE, III

Taj Alexander Mahon-Haft

Shirtless muscles ripple fluorescent institutional reflections of laughter in a cage, evidence of malnutrition not dietary regimen. Men find joyous whoops in echoes of bouncing cubes beneath gunmetal stairs framing our communal living room wagering Monopoly moolah representing ramen and deodorant. Plastic-clipped belts fail, state elastic-waisted denim sags beneath the weight of steel clips now only tattooed onto waistlines. Defanged and outside their hell, “demons” are hedons now lost. Have their hearts changed or were they always just seeking laughter?

Boyz ‘n tha Hood, studio set simulacrum which is reality which is the celluloid?

All things relative to their realm. Who drives culture and who rides shotgun?

What’s the difference between urban “men” and suburban “boys”?

Only a bullet to a BB, the sentence and the context, but their acts and points the same. Only the shade of the footage and the direction of the lens. Nighttime ghoul scream faces daylight are but toothy, goofy grins.

What’s a grand dragon but a ghost costume with a megaphone atop a whetted point?

All things relative to their realm.

Not all that is neutered has been fixed.

Self-defeat or destruction, self-destruction or defeat? Punctuation and context blend the words and erase boundaries.

All things relative to their realm.

IWI works within the Columbia Artist/Teachers (CA/T) program at Columbia University School of the Arts’ Writing Program. We gratefully acknowledge support and guidance from CA/T Director Stephanie Wobby and CA/T Faculty Advisor Alan Ziegler. Our gratitude to the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan.

We’d also like to thank Writing Program Chair Lis Harris, Director of Academic Administration Frank Winslow, Program Assistant John McShane. Thank you to Columbia’s School of the Arts: Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty; Jana Hart Wright, Dean of Academic Administration and Planning; Laila Maher, Dean of Student and Alumni Affairs; and Christina Rumpf, Senior Director of Communications.

This publication would not have been possible without the generosity of the Mark R. Robin Memorial Fund for Creative Writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SUBMISSIONS

Writers interested in submitting to Exchange can send their work to ColumbiaIWI@gmail.com, or physical copies to:

Incarcerated Writers Initiative 415 Dodge Hall Mail Code 1804 2960 Broadway New York, NY 10027

We only accept digital art submissions at this time.