Hi, this is Kenyatta Emmanuel. You know, for 25 years I felt like I had no role in society, no voice. I was surrounded by incredible people, incredible artists, and we all felt as though we would never have the opportunity to be heard. That's why I'm so glad to be a part of this project, so glad that PEN America has made it their mission to share the voices of the voiceless, and to ensure that that message is heard. This is a wonderful opportunity and I'm very grateful for it. I'm very grateful that I could add whatever I could to make this a success, to touch you, to offer something that will resonate with you and with yours, and with those people who are still feeling as though they have no voice.

--

Songwriter Kenyatta Emmanuel is an artist and activist who has shared his music from Sing Sing to Carnegie Hall. His music and message explore the beauty of life, love, and the human condition, reminding us of all that we hold in common.

This is Milton Jones reading “Flattop for Cherry Hill.” I’m formerly incarcerated, 23 years on the inside, and I am also an alumni of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) where my acting career began. That painful past is why it means a lot to me to read this piece. So without further ado, “Flattop for Cherry Hill” by Paul Betts:

--

Jimmie was patient while I covered him from the neck down with a sheet. As I began to slowly trim his mangy matted hair, Jimmie stated, “I guess they are going to win.”

“Win what?” I asked.

He began to talk about his last appeal. Everyone in prison has an issue or an appeal. Without one you have lost all hope. Jimmie’s hope was gone.

“Life means life in Michigan, only I cheated them. I’m going to die young,” he laughed.

One is somewhat at a loss when confronted with an aspect of reality that we ordinarily choose to ignore. We generally look away from a dead dog along the side of the road. We are privately angered that we had to see death at all. We all like anonymous death. Jimmie had about two weeks left and was anything but anonymous. He seemed reconciled to his personal clock. I asked if his family had been to see him. It was then that I learned about Cherry Hill.

Somewhere near the State Prison of Southern Michigan, the largest walled prison in the world, is a mound of earth. Blanket-buried for decades on this mound are the truly forgotten. Not only has society turned its back on these people, but their families have forgotten them. Some were old men who outlived their families and friends, some whose heinous acts have separated them completely from society, and some so poor families had no alternatives. Jimmie told me these people would soon be friends and neighbors.

I was cutting his hair slowly. I was not used to touching the living dead. Jimmie smiled. He could tell that his story troubled me. He asked if I could do him a favor. He wanted a flattop haircut. When he was young and before he had real problems he had a lot of friends. They all had flattops, and it made them feel “cool.” He would like to be “cool” again.

I had never given a flattop. Truth is, I was not all that good a barber, but I said I would try. There was much trial and error and eventually a fairly decent flattop. I took the handheld mirror, and showed him the results of my efforts.

“Man, those guys on Cherry Hill are going to be real envious,” he said. He did look good. It was mostly his smile. All the nurses made comments about how handsome he was. There was a certain comradeship that had developed among those of similar fate in the chronic care unit. A big, young, good-hearted male nurse pushed Jimmie up and down the hall to stop and talk for a few seconds with the bedridden long-termers he had gotten to know.

Comments of, “Go, Jimmie, they can’t beat you,” and “Lucky there aren’t women on Cherry Hill, they sure would be in trouble,” echoed as Flattop Jimmie was wheeled down to his room, put in bed and locked in. His dying memories, I believe, were of the times of his youth when he had friends with flattops, and hope.

Alongside a bramble-overgrown path on Cherry Hill lies Flattop Jimmie with his friends forever.

Paul Betts won first prize in memoir in PEN America’s 1999–2000 Prison Writing Awards for “Flattop For Cherry Hill.”

This is Casey Gerald reading “Notes for if I Fade Away (Brownout ‘03).”

This is to remind you that I loved you

way back. You, with your sleepless

rivers & strings of power lines -- titans

gathered into formations of tender

flesh & luminous pleasures. You

are always moving. Longing, we say,

because desire is full of endless distances.

An apartment building. Two boys, different

shades of brown. Sun above, acting

as father. Prayer as two fists arcing -- brown

boy with good hair choked by the parentheses

of his shoulders -- broken horse. Please don't

mistake these notes for elegies. These are the breaks

the summer where I learned of hunger & the absence

of pain. Bridgewater, that slagheap

hooptee moored in our oak-ridden suburbs. Glimmers

of future lives. Sashabaw, Dixie

Maybee. Loose change for 75 cent coneys. The big homies

pushing bags behind the skatepark -- all the white

paint peeling off the divider wall. The chain-link

fence we tore back between our cracked pavement

& the fairway. The brownout that melted five

days — how I dipped my feather-light body

in the tub to keep cool. The water

searching me like so many soft lights. The general

mind was hollow back then & I did as I do now

sketched your patterns into the margins

of my ribs. This was before Meet me

at the corner wash or your turn to go

to the Marathon became slang for the lies

we believed. Before the 3AM streetlights

the palms crowded with earth-tones. Before I learned

logic & before we should've read Hamlet: Lord,

we know who we are yet we know not what

we may be. Where I learned to be in the middle

of bright islands & dimebags. Those whisper-filled trees

the pavement begging to kiss my knees.

Justin Rovillos Monson, inaugural PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow, is a first-generation Filipino-American poet and writer and winner of the inaugural 2017 Kundiman/Asian American Literary Review/Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center Mentorship in poetry. Monson’s work has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Asian American Literary Review, Pacifica Literary Review, The Offing, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is working on his first collection of poems, and is currently serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections, from which he hopes to be released in 2027.

After Artist’s second stay (120 days Ad Seg for making veiled threats to a therapist) he was moved to 2-Wing, one of the typical dislocations that occur on return to population. At lights out, squatting on discarded plastic buckets brought in from the docks, they hunkered down over Nova’s headboard and constructed Artist’s astrological chart. Nova, sipping instant coffee between streams of chatter, had a floppy ephemeris, weighty tome, spread over his knees. DOB: 7 November 1992, 1803 hrs. Sunset. San Juan, Puerto Rico. Concentric circles and triangles took form in the yellow light of the desk lamp. After three nights of work, Nova put the pencil down and proclaimed with confidence:

– Your next visit to the Hole will be in three months.

It’s not an actual hole as in a hole in the ground like a mouse hole or a snake hole, though it could be thought of as a shelter or a place to hide. Many consider convicts animals, burrowing nocturnals. A grave is a hole: it allows a body to decompose in darkness, out of sight, out of mind. A hole is also a trap, something you stumble into that you then can’t get out of. A body orifice having a sexual function is often referred to as a hole, like a mouth, a pussy, an asshole. Phonetically, we call to mind a refuge with holistic purposes, a sanctuary, a retreat, where a prisoner rehabilitates, becomes whole. Many think of “being in the hole” as being in debt, and for an inmate it does entail that, because you lose your good time and your work credits and your job and your status (a recurring catastrophe that kept Artist in the lowest paying jobs, having to make up the difference in the sex trade). Nova, focused as always on the cosmic, thinks of it as a black hole, from which there is no escape, though he prefers to put more emphasis on the Event Horizon, that point of no return, and the moments leading up to its crossing.

Artist ran away from home at age 14, though he didn’t literally “run away” unless that’s what you want to call hiding in the barn for a couple of days. He crawled into a narrow dirt space between an empty horse stall and the north outer wall, next to the chicken yard. His foster parents no longer kept horses and there was nothing in the barn except rotting hay and stored implements: the tractor, a hay cart, and an old truck engine. At night he snuck into the house after his foster parents went to sleep to get something to eat. Two whole days he spent in that cramped and dirty and moldy-smelling barn, filled with a kind of total joy he’d never known before. He imagined his foster parents sitting at the kitchen table, worried, discussing him. They would think about the scars on his chest from the cigarette burns his real parents had given him.

Nova was very clear concerning the why. The placement of Saturn, the peculiar nature of his 12th House and its relation to his 4th, indicated long periods of isolation. But explaining the why still left you with the dilemma of the how, once you’re there.

Artist went to the library with Supernova and pored over coffee table books on the Cosmos, color photographs of Mars and Saturn, the planets Nova claimed were giving him all his trouble. Nova was inclined to look for influence flowing from the outward to the inward. Artist, vice versa. He spread Artist’s chart out on the table and used a pencil to indicate the maleficent positions: Saturn on the Ascendant in opposition to the Sun in the 7th House, Mars precisely in-between, squared to both. Bad voodoo. Artist thought of himself as a spiritual warrior, a hero of the Imagination. Nova had red hair, green eyes, and toenails black with fungus. With five planets in the Fire sign of Leo your metabolism runs hot and you will sweat easily and profusely. Nova’s Sun was in Taurus. He was rooted in the Earth, very stubborn. A builder of houses, a foundation for people. He was a woman in a man’s body. The way he put it, each day was a circle/cycle—each week, each month, each year, each decade, each lifetime—and the natal chart simply took you through the cycle, the trick being to find your place in it.

It all went down in a secluded shower room, an isolated area of cold beige tile, an array of showers and sinks and wooden benches. Four officers in breath masks and blue latex gloves stood waiting, flexing their fingers, while a plainclothes told Artist to strip. The children lived in a house trailer a mile away through the sparsely wooded hollow. A dirt area out front, along which Artist rode his bike, had a large oak with a rope swing strung from a lower branch. Artist parked the bike and pushed the two children, a boy and a girl, on the swing. Artist was to hand each garment to an officer as he removed it. The officer would then examine the garment and toss it to the floor. A dark cold place in late afternoon, their voices reverberating off the walls like hollow echoes, pale light above through a clouded window, showers dripping. The children told him they were cousins, not siblings. He took to leading them out into the hollow for adventures, farther each successive time, until they were able to see his barn across the field. Artist kept his focus on a rust colored water stain in the corner stall, a Rorschach, beetle-shaped, fractal, stretching from the ceiling to a point above the mop bucket. He led them across the field into the barn and suggested they play a game. He had them stand up on the workbench and remove their clothes. He received each garment from them as they removed it. The plainclothes’ droopy face had a mouth slightly open all the time. He initially mistook the burn scars for tattoos. The officers made a catalogue of his tattoos. He placed the children side by side, naked, stepped back and extended his hands toward them to find the energy. The levels were very high. Fluid, curving abstract lines and circles composed of black ink and bare skin, they entwine and connect like a highway interchange, they break off or lay straight or twirl into spirals. Artist stepped forward and placed his hands flat against their genitals, his left hand on the boy and his right hand on the girl. The energy ran through his arms and shot up and down his spine. Batshit splattered on the workbench beside them. The children stared straight ahead the whole time and didn’t move. The tattoos are all of a piece; they connect everywhere at some point or other. They are images of the very worms that will devour his corpse once he’s dead.

On a warm summer night of dark rain clouds, strings of bare bulbs and larger lights circled the tent, the packed columns of the congregation swaying and sounding. “Praise Him! Hallelujah!” Heat lightning scribbled across the clouds. The old gospel song swelled into its chorus, the congregation on their feet clapping, following the pastor’s lead on stage, who paced around pumping his arms, whipping the microphone cord, singing lead and shouting “Hallelujah!” “Praise Him! Glory!” The distant rainstorm sideswiped the district and let a cool breeze flap the tent. The pastor headed down the aisle, laying hands on foreheads, pronouncing mighty benedictions, as the flock swayed and fell backward on the sawdust. Artist, sandwiched between his parents, transfixed, could sense an awesome force being unleashed. As he got closer Artist felt he was being given to the man’s reaching grasp. Reddish blue energy sparkled along the ends of outstretched fingers, reaching, reaching…

Contact.

Artist was never the same after that.

Artist was released from Martinville and the Municipal Office gave him a job in the park at the riverside, picking up trash. He was too old to hustle. The days were long but there was no rush. No one bothered him. He had time to bring the old head squatting under the plank boards by the burnt building a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He spent a lot of time walking along the river, pretending to work. His favorite thing was to hide in the storage shed where they kept the lawnmowers. There was a separate room in the shed about the size of a jail cell. When the scars burned he would lock himself in and sit on the concrete floor. No one bothered him. Far above, in the darkness beyond the light, stars and constellations turned like a carousel, forever, and on each day that passed he could feel Saturn Rising. And he knew that he could wait.

Arthur Fitzgerald won first prize in fiction in PEN America’s 2015–2016 Prison Writing Awards for Saturn Returns.

Hello, my name is Nicole Shawan Junior, and I’d like to thank PEN America’s Prison and Writing Justice Program and Works of Justice Podcast for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this beautiful offering. As a woman writer and felon, I am grateful to give voice to the literary art created by another woman who happens to be incarcerated. I am honored to read this poem about women like the ones who raised me, women like the ones I love most. I hope that I give this piece the honor that it deserves. Okay with that said, again this is Nicole Shawan Junior reading “Prison Eulogies” by Yvette M Louisell:

The ones who died

never mattered much

except in here

where the stories never end

because they’re too real

Michelle

who beat her girl

until she got out

and got her own self

killed

Stella

who laughed & laughed

until that last hit

hit her vein

Whoda thought

a pulled tooth

would make Kim

bleed to death

or that Pat’s heart

was really that bad

They don’t make announcements here

but we always know

And every time,

I can’t kneel down

for months after

My mouth won’t move

the way it should

It’s not me

It’s never me

It’s always me

Yvette M. Louisell grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Cincinnati, Ohio. She was incarcerated at age 17 and is currently serving a life-without-parole sentence in Iowa. Louisell is a multi-year winner of PEN America Prison Writing Awards in poetry.

Ashley Starling Thomas was awarded Second Prize in Drama in the 2019 Prison Writing Contest.

Hi. My name is Amanda Miller and I'm going to be reading “The Little Prisoner” by Robert McKowen. It’s a fictional piece about a woman giving birth in prison, and I think it's a topic that could use a lot more attention. So it’s my honor to be able to read it for you. Thank you for listening. “The Little Prisoner” by Robert McKowen:

--

I was one of the luckiest prisoners ever because I’d done eight months in prison and I don’t remember a single second of it. I was spared the hardship and grief most suffer in prison. I know it may sound crazy but time meant nothing to me. I hadn’t been introduced to it yet because time doesn’t exist in the womb. Yes, I was baby number 09344-027. I was born in prison.

Having been born in prison isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s not like my mother was lying on a steel bunk in a dank cell, covered with the standard issued, itchy green, waterproof army blankets. Or it’s not like correctional officers were standing around with rubber gloves strapped to their elbows, waiting to shake me down for contraband—God forbid I bring anything into this world I shouldn’t have.

Technically, I was delivered in a hospital but my mother was still a prisoner. Being in a hospital didn’t relieve her of her oppressors. She had no control, no rights. Had I died during delivery or days after, she wouldn’t have been able to attend my funeral.

This is her story.

***

March 23

Dear Diary,

I hope you don’t mind my calling you Diary when you’re only a pad of paper but I’ve never written to a diary before, or a pad of paper, and Diary just sounds more official. It was my counselor’s idea. I wasn’t going to take her advice because she sincerely doesn’t care, but when she offered me a free notebook to use, it was enough of an incentive.

Earlier, my bunkie said, “I wish I was pregnant.”

“Why,” I said, thinking if she says so she can get a free notebook, I’m slapping her.

“So I can get a bottom bunk restriction.”

I did feel like slapping her but I let it be. I have not only myself to look after now. She’s a hoe anyway. She’s playing a girl in Alpha unit and one in Echo unit. When one finds out about the other, she’ll get hers.

I’m new at this prison stuff. I’ve only been here a few weeks but I’ve got the basics figured out. Mind your own business and avoid getting sucked into other people’s drama. Because most of these women are walking tornados, destroying everything in their paths, leaving behind a trail of broken homes and injured people. My goal is not to become another one of their casualties. Prison is like the board game SORRY; it’s all about making it home without getting bumped off. And I’ve got two pieces to get home now.

I called him today, and, after that whole spiel about not getting an abortion, he’s changed his mind and wants nothing to do with the baby. I asked him why. He doesn’t have a valid reason. Sometimes I question his humanity. I’m not going to stress over it. It’ll be his loss. I can’t force him to stay.

I saw the prison OB doctor today. He saw no reason to remove me from general population and said I didn’t need any prenatal vitamins. It was my first slap in the face with reality. I’m bringing a child into this world from prison. And I’m doing it alone.

May 12

Dear Baby,

I’m not calling you Diary anymore. It’s not as personal. It’s like talking to the wall—or my bunkie. So I’m calling you Baby. I can now sense you inhabiting me. Borrowing from me what nutrients are available, zapping my energy. It’s okay though, I wish I could give you more but I can only give what I have. I’m showing some. But if you didn’t know better, you’d just assume I put on weight from the starchy, carb loaded prison diet.

I spoke with my unit team today. Because my due date is long before my outdate, foster care was the topic of the day. don’t want to deliver you into the hands of a stranger. I’m sure the state would select a wonderful couple, good people. The type of good people who won’t want to hand over the adorable baby they’ve nurtured all those months to a stranger. An ex-con. I wouldn’t blame them. It’s a two sided coin.

You never dream of this type of situation until you’re in it. Who would think that anywhere in the world, especially America, it would be considered humane to separate a baby from its mother, against her will, immediately after birth. Their excuse: I was in possession of cocaine. This is their justification to separate mother and child. I could understand if I was a cartel member responsible for bringing large quantities into the country or a major trafficker, moving pounds or ounces from state to state into the communities but I was a petty dealer and user only looking to support my own habit. But I was just a plain, tax-paying American citizen with a drug problem. Punishment is the only acceptable answer. A casualty of war. A war as senseless as Vietnam. The war on drugs.

I am a P.O.W.

July 13

Dear Baby Inside Me,

I decided that baby was too general of a term so I am now calling you Baby Inside Me. It’s more intimate.

I keep thinking they’re going to come to me and say, “You’ve been humiliated enough. Surely you’ve learned your lesson. After all, you are pregnant. Giving birth is sacred. It’s what continues our race. It would be disgraceful to punish a pregnant woman for such a petty offense. Besides, it was only a little cocaine.”

I’m not totally sure but if you’re a boy you’ll be Andrew or Paul, if you’re a girl you’ll be Hailee or Kaylee. I’ve been watching the callout sheet for a medical appointment, but nothing. I’m beginning to wonder if they’ve forgotten us.

Goodnight my love.

September 10

Dear Hailee,

Can you believe I went my entire second trimester without a check-up? One trip to the warden at mainline settled that. I’ve also got good news. I’ve talked my mother into taking you so I don’t have to fight the state to get you back from foster care. It’s such a relief but also I worry because my mother is an alcoholic. Then again, she raised me and I’m still here. I’d rather you be with her than strangers. At least I know she’ll be delighted to give you back. And we’ll always have something in common, having been nurtured into this world by the same woman. We’ll be sisters of sorts.

What scares me the most is that you won’t want to be around me when I come home. That you’ll be so attached to my mother that you won’t want to come with me. I’ll be the stranger I didn’t want to see you with. My only solace is you’ll be too young to remember any of it and since I believe everything happens for a reason, I know that when it’s all said and done, this prison experience will have made me a better person, allowing me the opportunity to appreciate the things in life people take for granted daily, thus enriching the quality of my life.

The time will come for us to part and the days will be long and the nights dark but you’ll be the guiding light at the end of the tunnel.

Goodnight Sunshine.

November 26

Dear Hailee,

Today is Thanksgiving.

I knew I was going into labor before it actually happened. I had been having minor, irregular contractions all that weekend. I knew you were coming but I was trying to hold out as long as possible because I didn’t want you to leave me.

On Sunday night I had a dream that I gave birth to you in my bunk, quietly, only my bunkie knew. We were passing you back and forth from top bunk to bottom. You were laughing and playing. We hid you during count and fed you Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. At daybreak my bunkie helped me stuff you back inside of me for the day. Then I birthed you again at night. A strange dream indeed. If only it were possible.

I went to sick call that Monday morning. They walked me to R&D, dressed me out and cuffed me. At the hospital, when the doctor told me I was definitely in labor, I started crying. I was losing you and I was totally helpless to do anything about it. The epidural only covered the physical pain. At least they uncuffed my hands—after shackling me to the bed. I was shackled to the bed during delivery. I later found this to be a mistake but I was grateful for it because it offered the C.O.’s guarding me enough comfort to respect my privacy by leaving the room during birth when they weren’t supposed to.

I stayed in the hospital with you for two days, shackled to the bed the entire time. I was shackled and watched during bathroom use and showers. I barely slept. I didn’t want to lose a single second with you. You’re the prettiest baby I’ve ever seen. I still can’t believe you’re mine. However, it doesn’t feel so. Giving you up was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. It was like saying goodbye before having the chance to say hi. They wouldn’t even let me see my mother. The nurse came and took you to her. I ended up having to hand you over to a stranger, anyhow.

I was taken back to the prison and dressed in. The only relief was being unshackled. I’d never been shackled for so long a time ever. I could still feel the phantom shackles hours after they’d been removed. My mother brought you to visit me at the prison one last time before traveling the five-hundred miles home. I laid in bed for a long time. I cried and slept. Cried and slept. I felt so light without you. Devoid of substance I was nearly floating. The doctor pressed me to consider anti-depressants as though the cure could be found in a pill. How about letting me go home.

That’s the cure.

***

My mother’s journal stopped there.

Robert McKown is 42 years old, a graduate of Long Ridge Writer’s Group, and writes both fiction and nonfiction. McKown has had short stories published in small publications such as Downstate Story and Conceit. An honorable mention award winner of the PEN American Prison Writing Contest of 2007 for the first chapter of his memoir, Bobby’s Innocence, McKown captured second prize in the 2009–2010 fiction category for Little Prisoner.

I always run toward the sound of shouting, metal crunching

and glass shattering

My mom would wonder aloud where she went wrong in my rearing. She thought one day she would find me in a body bag or worse, missing,

I’d be lost. My bones, lonely,

bleached by the unyielding sun.

I hate hospitals, morgues and funeral homes although my activity

speaks differently—

I am the first to arrive

Mom requested only my company during her final days.

She utilized the quiet gift the feared in me while

I watched her last breath and the pulse stop in her neck.

Life was clear and sharp. Death uncovered without discrimination.

In the year after she blew with the wind and floated and sunk

in her most private rivers,

I attended six wakes.

We are all aware of the charade.

The cans on the shelf are straightened in hopes it will change

the flavor of the contents

I yearned for the day my pulse would stop and I could be

with my mom. What I didn’t see happening—

a purposeful disorganization in the Kitchen,

product kept and unkept,

more flavor to the unsalted

and a stronger desire

to live.

Caroline Ashby was born small but grew large in mind. Her brother, George, is her hero. She loves swimming, dancing, watching films, walking dogs, and listening to punk rock. She enjoys teaching yoga, designing clothing, studying African American history and water/food conservation. She stands for kindness, compassion, and expressions of love.

My name is Adam Falkner. I’m a poet and an educator, and I’m honored to be reading the brilliant, “Grace Notes” by poet Matthew Mendoza. I chose to stand for this writer because I believe that the racial caste system that is mass incarceration in this country presents probably the greatest threat to American democracy today. And I believe in creativity and education as practices of freedom, and everyone regardless of circumstance but especially those whose voices are being systematically silenced, has a vital story to tell. I feel called to the work of amplifying those stories and whatever small ways I can. So it is an absolute honor, an honor to share this poem.

Matthew, thank you for the opportunity and thank you for your work. When I read it I should say, in this moment of hysteria and coronavirus uncertainty where we're all swinging back and forth between slight normalcy and fear and doom, where we're all scared and anxious and worried about the people we love, Mathew’s poem stopped me dead in my tracks. At a moment where everyone I know and love some of us for the first time are faced with real questions of their own mortality and their own freedom. Matthew slows the world down and reminds us to take a breath. He offers us an ode to the beauty of the natural world the mundane, the ritual, the jumbled prayer of forgiveness, and gratitude, and the importance of, good God the importance, of grace, of goodness of finding ways to pick our heads up, be kind to each other and notice the sky again and again. This is “Grace Notes” by Matthew Mendoza:

“Grace Notes”

If there is a place of grace

It is not here

Beside this seasonal stream.

The water does all the things

That water does—

Burble, trickle, rush and roar

Like the moments of our days become lives

Wearing us smooth.

We are not river stones.

There is no grace here.

This is just water.

Just like food is not love

And washing your hands

Of the heart’s stains is just a myth.

Forgiveness does not flow like water.

It’s fall. It’s always fall now.

Leaves are not hands.

Still I read their palms.

My fingers drift along

The frame of the still leaf.

I tell the leaf,

Sometimes you are outgoing.

Sometimes you are wary.

You find it scary to reveal too much.

The trees share decades

But their leaves are short-lived.

Forgotten moments

Frozen in an orange fire.

I practice forgiveness and gratitude

And mumble a jumbled prayer

As I set the leaf sail.

I follow the glassed glide

Of its early journey.

Then, as I stumble over

Dirt, beer cans, condoms

This becomes a mirror of my own life.

The stem, like dreams,

Make an impotent rudder.

The leaf drifts past a rock.

As my leaf circles

In the eddy of a near miss

A boulder becomes a matter of perspective.

My own hurt becomes the stream.

My pain wearing smooth

The lives of people I love.

I watch the leaf

Circle, circle sink.

I go back to the place I started

And find another leaf.

If this one sinks

I’ll find another.

I know that this stream is not

Forgiveness

Or goodness

Or grace

But it is only water I have.

Matthew Mendoza won the 2018 PEN Prison Writers Poetry Award and was a finalist for the American Short Fiction Insider Prize. His play, Freedom Feather, was performed at the Brooklyn Book Festival as part of “Break Out: Voices from the Inside: 2018.” Grace Notes & Other Poems is coming soon from Swimming With Elephants Publications. Mendoza answers hate mail, love letters, and questionnaires and thanks you for hearing him.

The Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), by PEN America, is an online collaboration of more than 600 global organisations that provide life-saving resources to artists worldwide who face oppression, persecution, arrest, and violence for their creative work. visit site.

Featured Artists:

Khalid Albaih is a Sudanese artist and political cartoonist who has gained global recognition for work that incisively depicts life in the Arab world and interrogates themes of social and political injustice. Describing himself as a “virtual revolutionist,” Albaih’s cartoons convey sharp and poignant criticisms of authoritarian and repressive regimes, while also expressing solidarity and hope for the future.

Zehra Doğan, journalist, activist, and artist, is a passionate defender of women’s rights and opponent of Turkish oppression of their Kurdish citizens. Her work at Jinha, a Feminist Kurdish news agency, as an independent journalist, has garnered acclaim. In 2015, she received the Metin Göktepe Journalism Award for her series of articles about Yazidi women escaping from ISIS captivity. In addition, her work as an artist has received similar acclaim.

Taeyong Jeong is a visual artist and painter from Anyang, South Korea. He is also known by the alias HIDEYES, a representation of what Jeong calls “the eye of the mind.” “HIDEYES is not a mere vision. It contains a message about the ‘mind’s eye.’ What you see is not always the truth”, wrote Jeong on his website. Jeong relies on bold colors to express himself through a variety of creative media, including illustration, clothing, live painting, and calligraphy. In addition to visual art, he also performs poetry.

RTA uses the transformative power of the arts to help people in prison develop skills to unlock their potential and succeed in the larger community. RTA also seeks to raise public awareness of the humanity behind prison walls.

The Confined Arts (TCA) is a program that cultivates and showcases the talents and creative voices of artists directly impacted by mass incarceration and intersecting social justice issues. TCA enables artists to express their voices through the visual and performing arts, poetry, and music as a means to abolish inhumane narratives and socially degrading stigmas that are used to describe the past experiences and limit the futures of individuals impacted by incarceration. Through artistry, collaborative activism, research, education and training, TCA equips artists to influence policy change, and use their artistry and knowledge to advocate for a world anchored on empathy and saturated with healing and prevention-based policies.

Featured Artist:

Lisette Oblitas-Cruz

I’m a formerly incarcerated women who served nearly 4.5 years in a state prison in Connecticut. As a self-taught artist, my art flourished and took a more individualized shape during my time behind bars -- where most forms of self-expression are very limited if not at all restrained. Art became my therapy: a window from which grief, pain, sorry, hope and resilience freely expressed themselves through the arts without judgment reinforcing who I truly was as an individual not longer overshadow by the social label attached to the criminal justice world. Art today, continues to play an important part in my life, as it continues to reshape my identity, in many forms, it continues to bring out the best part of me.