Jordan Smith: Ducktail
if you want
A good story, he told me, I mean one
You can take to heart, don’t ask anyone
With one foot out the car door
Charlotte Matthews: Fog Count at Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center
…pregnant women are shackled even in labor. They are allowed to have their babies with them for one week, then they are taken away. Most will never see their children again
Audio: Son House performing County Farm Blues
Put you under a man called “Captain Jack”
Put you under a man they call “Captain Jack”
He’ll sure write his name up and down your back
Joseph Bathanti: Cletis Pratt
First man I ever saw in irons,
wearing nothing but a pair of scurvy white
long john britches, was Cletis Pratt
Betsy Sholl: Haibun | Tarantula
Our creature, named Slash, also bulked up. He had a taste for crickets we fed each week…
Matthew J. Parker: Cancer Dancers
I met Gerenith in 2006. Found her on a dating website that featured women from Cali, Colombia, aka the Salsa Capital of the World.
Matthew J. Parker: Pardon Me
The reason for the assault was absurd – an imagined slight over a game of cutthroat pinochle we had played earlier that day.
Charles Davidson: Reflections on “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” (the Movie and the Man)
Despite the film’s deficiencies, excesses, and flagrant exploitation by those willing to corrupt Bonhoeffer to their own sinister purposes, there is something to be said for the film’s implied warning about the rising tide of authoritarianism in America.
Cecilia Zavala: Pardon Me | Ending the Stigma That Harms Generations
When we reduce people to their convictions, we fail to see their humanity, their potential, and the harm this judgment causes not just to them but to their families.
Matthew Parker: Foot Soldier
As a junkie and petty thief, I often found myself caught like a foot soldier behind enemy lines in the war on drugs. And, like most street-level addicts, it was inevitable that I’d become a prisoner of war.
Video: Tuesday Afternoon
After 33 years in federal prison, 22 of which spent in extreme solitary confinement, Jack Powers embarks into a modern world, journeying across the Northeast to start a new life.
Matthew J. Parker: Prison Reform Envisioned by a Convicted Felon
I’ve had a lot of things done to me in both jail and prison, but coddling was never one of them. Yet in the late 1980s and 1990s, I heard this word used continually to describe prisons
Larry Levis: Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
Howard Zinn: Thoughts on Civil Disobedience
They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.
