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.