Davi Gray was awarded an Honorable Mention in Poetry in the 2022 Prison Writing Contest.
Every year, hundreds of imprisoned people from around the country submit poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works to PEN America’s Prison Writing Contest, one of the few outlets of free expression for the country’s incarcerated population.
There is a certain reluctance among
us people in prison and those (yes,
I said people, but what I mean
is Travis and Andrew and James,
Osma, Davon, H-Town, Black,
Shorty and Rocko and Red and Tank)
who are on our side—there are
sides, yes indeed, not just left
behind or raptured right
inside the walls or outside
fences, caught between defense
and prosecution (so close to
“persecution,” but believe
me, all of us are safer with
some of us locked up or
locked down, if fewer than any
of us might count or know)—
advocates for a more humane,
which is not to say human,
distribution of justice,
which is not to say mercy,
to acknowledge that here, in
this very place where we abide,
for retribution, punishment,
deterrence, or rehab—to be taught a lesson, or set
an example (“This, children, is what
you want to avoid in your life,”
the void so easily filled with story
of who, or rather what, we are
or were or could become if
left to our own devices or in
the grips of our vices) never
mind the moral complications
of punishing Peter save
Paul, sacrificing the few
to save the all (for certain
limited values of “all”)—
set apart for our sins,
the secular version of sins, that is,
we, having moved beyond the New
Testament virtues of love
and forgiveness, into the grim
dark business of old, I for
an I makes the whole world
balanced in the scales
of the carefully blinded Justice—
we are yet living, are alive,
to be reminded that there are
days, hours, minutes, even weeks,
when we do not, in fact, weep,
when we eat food that our
tongues might rejoice in, we
laugh like men might laugh
at a joke that the free
world might laugh at, or cry
when a child is said to die;
we hunger and are filled
with the bite of a sharp wind,
roll over and are comforted
by the embrace of a fresh-
ly laundered sheet; our sleep
some nights even sets us free.
Shhhhh.
Purchase Variations on an Undisclosed Location: 2022 Prison Writing Awards Anthology here.
