Stingy Kids

The Tooth

(Amiriya, Baghdad)

In your head I whisper:
A tooth, blue as a cinder
And I ask: Coward,
Whose pain is it anyway?
Your cells are a blizzard,
Your mind a ragbook, yet
I dream you into growth
Luscious as papaya flesh
Around my black seed.

Why this need to condemn?
I have felt your bones
Gasp in their foundry,
And at night you do not know
But I have heard your blood
Like a bench of silversmiths
Pause at its work.
Then continue.

Once I dreamed
You inside a laboratory
When you stared at a kernel of phosphorus
Until it sprouted fire;
And thirty years later
Ached in your skull
As you stooped in the shelter
Of Amiriya to pick the tooth
Of a child like a rice grain
From the ash.

We’ve been together
Such a long time now.
And my roots
Go all the way down.

—Robert Minhinnick

Welsh poet Rober Minhinnick (b. 1952) traveled to Iraq in 1998 as one of the producers of "From Radioactive Mines to Radioactive Weapons," a documentary on the use of depleted uranium in modern warfare and its environmental impact. In 1999, he won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem for "Twenty-Five Laments for Iraq." He is also one of poets featured in the anthology 100 Poets Against the War, which you can download here for free.

The Cloister of Time

The prison officials do not say when I die, no matter what they write on paper. They simply gave me a world to fill with whatever I decided would be there. They called it a cell; they called it death row. I called it a cave and I wasn't a prisoner. I was a monk, there to contemplate, to grow, to do my inner work. I've since come to see that in a way, my imprisonment was a gift.

—Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, Exonerated 1992

Doing Time, Doing Writing

The Exonerated is such a sparse, intimate production that it makes you wonder if you have stepped into a private conversation. The cast consists of ten actors, who sit in a row, only occasionally turning and looking at each other; even those who portrayed couples looked outward, as though they had lost the habit of conversation. The intended effect was to make the audience a participant in these dialogues, but it also heightened the rift between those live within and outside of a prison cell.

During the show, a young woman just got up and left. She can choose whether or not to listen to these stories, but for those represented on the stage, if they are going to talk about the past at all, this is the only story they can tell. Those who have lost years of their lives to the errors of the United States penal system have no other choice. Some of us wondered out loud what we would do if we were faced with the possibility of years inside a cell. Would we write a novel? Read a 100 books a year? Write on walls? Go insane?

After the show, the actors read selections from Doing Time: 25 Years fo Prison Writing, an anthology of poems, essays, and stories written by prisoners. One poem I like, "After Almost Twenty Years," starts like this:

This is getting difficult.

Perhaps there's another formula
      for happiness and contentment
      I haven't explored or exhausted yet.

But I talk to birds...

—Chuck Culhane (b. 1944, Bronx)

The introduction by Bell Gale Chevigny provides a brief history of the PEN Prison Writing Program (PWP), on which she draws from her own experiences as a teacher in penitentiaries. I don't often see academia and activism go hand in hand (at least, not in my ivory tower), but this book is showing me that it can be otherwise. I can think of one or two literature classes that could use a lesson on "that huge colonized nation inside the USA—the one called Penitentiary or Prison" (Grace Paley).

International Congress of Fear

For the time being, we won't sing of love,
which sought refuge beyond the underground.
We'll sing of fear, which paralizes embraces.
We won't sing of hate because it doesn't exist,
only fear, our father and companion, exists,
the great fear of prairies, seas and deserts,
the fear of soldiers, of mothers, of churches,
we'll sing of the fear of dictators, of democrats,
we'll sing of the fear of death and the fear after death,
afterwards, we'll die of fear
and over our tombs yellow and terrifying flowers will grow.

—Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Brazilian, 1902-1987)