And so to close from this series,
I'm going to read a piece that I wrote for Illinois of Humanity,
a project in Chicago, Illinois.
And they are also in Art for Justice Network,
and they asked a dozen folks about what did it
mean to think about social distancing in prison
during COVID?
This is called Corrective State.
It's a bonus poem.
It's like maxi singles.
Anybody remember maxi singles?
Shout out to you if you remember cassette tapes
and maxi singles.
San Quentin ain't got a skyline to dream about,
but my uncle's pride in my ability
to recover from an ankle twist on a slab of broken concrete
makes it seem so.
They say I play pick up games like I've been to the pen,
I smirk, a double dribble skipping
across my mistaken face.
20 years later, a solar system rids a planet,
makes itself a new moon to rock the tides, still
the barbed wire and shotguns work like clock clicks
and my father still don't know how many times
I've challenged death.
The COVID-19 that spread across my chest,
my breathing so close to an island submerged in fluid.
I stuttered awake on the 11th night.
I wept until the cold medicine carried me back to sleep.
The sickness lies.
A boundaryless wretch, and it's the most American thing
I've ever felt. Secure in my home
and still dying from the heat of capitalism.
They are reopening the world after the planet tried
to reset itself, and the prisons are still
packed with people afraid to believe in redemption.
Racist adjacent smiles forgive white collar crimes
as hedge funds funnel into protective custody.
A static of dispatch, the walls clean with other men's teeth.
Antibody tests smell like Henrietta Lacks coming back
to remind us what happens when you trust a house of poachers,
and they call us ungovernable.
The way we picket and protest.
This mourning is a reminder.
Steel bars don't melt with silence.
The people behind bars are captives of war.
The people stolen into camps and cages
stretch beyond the steel and unshakeable whisper
tremors our collectivity, I want to go home.
I want to hold my daughter.
I want to see my mother one last time.
There ain't no poem in that.
The human form was not meant to be locked up, locked down, cage
bound.
Consider your own bones, the way you lengthen
as soon as you turn your face to the sun, a mask over your nose,
relinquishing yourself to this adaptation of love
and inhale the new day crisp in its welcome.
Send a kite to Folsom as we correct our form.
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]