Tag: prison industrial complex

Inside the Serotonin Industrial Complex

By Dick Westheimer

  

“The only winning move is not to play.”
—from the movie War Games

“You can’t call it anything else. It’s just slavery.”
—Calvin Thomas, who spent more than 17 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, working the fields and cattle processing facilities as part of his terms of incarceration.

 

When I shop these days, especially
online, it feels so much like playing
inside a video game. There, my avatar
only dies when it runs out of coin,

and to level up all I need is ISP speed
and free delivery for stuff I didn’t know about
until it came up in my feed. This
is first-person-shooter shit. Point and click

on new Bluetooth earbuds and a child miner
in the DRC falls in a pit. Need some chicken
wings? An inmate at Angola State Pen,
gets crushed in the gears

of a feather plucking machine. A sack
of flour in my cart? Or Frosted Flakes? Outside
an Arkansas lock-up, a pennies-per-day guy
in an orange jump suit has his skull cracked

by a truncheon. Everyone is in the game.
Some hands are on PCs, some on business
plans, some on guns, some bloody and raw
pulling rocks from the ground. This is the age

where my shopping cart is filled
by clicks—of leg-iron shackles
and handcuff hasps, of cell door locks
and a rifle’s trigger lifting.

This is the age of tantalum and tin,
of Archer Daniels Midland enslaving
someone’s kin, of Tony the Tiger
and Androids and the Mac laptop

I’m typing on—which leaks the tears
of some boy or girl or man who will
never be paroled. It’s the double
chocolate cookies I’ve made

from flour ground from the nightmares
of an old guy working the fields
of Parchman. It’s the cotton sheets

I sleep on woven out of inmates’ dreams.
It’s hope weeded from the red-clay fields
near Angola’s gates. Point & Click:
Same-minute shipment of serotonin—

squeezed from every human animal
chained inside my video game.
Point. Click. Drop in another coin,
keep playing the game

until I’ve won. Keep playing
the game until I’ve won. Point.
Click. Keep playing the game.

 

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominees. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, was published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com.

Photo credit: Sarah Starkweather via a Creative Commons license.

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Cell Block Tango

By Avra Margariti

 

A lullaby—seductive, hypnopaedic—slinks
through the high security ward
of the women’s prison.
Morrigan, the phantom queen

whistling between sharp teeth her very own
Cell Block Tango, banshee call
to arms. The doors all open wide

locks broken, passwords hacked, guard
uniforms painted red with life, never to
be washed clean again.

The inmates run, rubber soles over steel
and concrete, spilling through the courtyard
under the watchful eye of priestess Crow.
High on moonlight, bacchanal

the inmates dance like willow boughs
in the midst of a tornado.
They’ll drink the prison van’s gas for wine,
poison shared between thirsty lips,
cinereous uniforms set

on fire.

They’ll wear ferns for clothes,
or their skins
for clothes, or their bones—

their bones they will at last set free.

 

Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Pushcart-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, Liminality, Arsenika, The Future Fire, Space and Time, Eye to the Telescope, and Glittership. The Saint of Witches, Avra’s debut collection of horror poetry, is forthcoming from Weasel Press. You can find Avra on twitter @avramargariti.

Photo by Chris via a Creative Commons license.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Reading Aloud in Kidjail

By Jill McDonough

 

The boys in my local juvie want to work one
on one, write stories, poems, mark up the stuff
I give them. More than one kid at a time’s less fun:
more fussing, more holding back to show how tough
they are. When one of them writes on the other’s paper
the germophobic one loses his shit; I get it, sit
between them while they write their poems. Later
I read them aloud so they can hear how good they are; it’s
like a magic trick, their words in my grown-up voice.
They still and listen, hear themselves, lean in on me
like children, because they are children. Two boys,
one on either side, a slow relax from anger in to breathe.
Their warm weights, cool of classroom, fresh pencils, stacks
of paper. Me feeling them thinking That sounds pretty good. Dag.

 

Jill McDonough is the author of Here All Night (Alice James, 2019), Reaper (Alice James, 2017), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), Oh, James! (Seven Kitchens, 2012), and Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, she taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for thirteen years. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry.  She teaches in the MFA program at UMass-Boston and started a program offering College Reading and Writing in Boston jails. Her website is jillmcdonough.com.

Image from Ideas.TED.com.

Teaching Poetry In Prison

By Susan Kelly-DeWitt

 

I think of him
as a victim
(a veteran)

of war—
every day was
the enemy

in a house-
hold that thought

children should
be punished
with barbed wire,

belts, burns, punches,
pinches, slaps, kicks,

starvation. Where meth
was the vitamin,
sex was the money,

where poverty was
the neighborhood,

poverty was
the country

and nobody ever
called him honey

until high school
freed him to be

part of something
larger than himself,

a gang. They robbed
a convenience
store, someone got

shot, killed—he did not
pull the trigger yet

here he is twenty
years later, life

without parole—
shaking my hand,
smiling at me,

thanking me
for helping him learn

one new word.

 

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the author of Gravitational Tug (forthcoming 2020), Spider Season (Cold River Press, 2016), The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008) and nine previous small press collections and online chapbooks. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, and in print and online journals at home and abroad. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Northern California Book Reviewers Association. For more information, please visit her website at www.susankelly-dewitt.com.

Photo by Aswin Deth on Unsplash.

The President Signs the Criminal Justice Reform Act

By Jack Mackey

 

In the Oval Office dripping in rehearsed applause
from the full-pocketed and the bloated
paid to do a job by corporate wardens enriched
by a three-strike law that scooped up traffic
violators like escaped farm animals

surrounded by billionaire brothers who bought
a conscience on closeout after years of dictating to
lap dog stenographers in the Capitol their wishes
placing innocents into the jaws of a meat grinder

smoothing silk tie with one hand he grins
and turns with camera-ready graciousness to his left
to his right cloaks himself in the mantle of
unearned praise halfway extends his barely average
hands to his greedy kin who get credit for
finally noticing injustice now
because it nested in their family patch

he moves the pen up and down with theatrical force
forging a scribbled signature turning his name towards
the cameras like a child with a finger painting.

I watch this revival-tent duplicity on my TV
wondering, how do we mend a wingless sparrow how
do we put a daddy’s push on the seat of a girl’s swing how
do we place a mother’s palm on a boy’s delicate
fingers guiding as he practices his letters.

How will a new law fix a bad law, return
the confiscated lift all the clothes and furniture
evicted to the curb and fly them back inside the house?

 

Jack Mackey lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Washington, D.C.  He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Maryland. His poems have been published by, or forthcoming in, Darkhouse Books, the Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild, Third Wednesday and Rat’s Ass Review.

Photo credit: From the ACLU website.