Before someone releases, we celebrate by making a spread — that’s prison jargon for “fancy meal” if you consider ramen, instant refried beans, and squeeze cheese the core ingredients for fancy … Sometimes I consider that it is counter intuitive to make a meal for someone, when in just a few days he’ll have access to a world of food I can’t remember the taste of — though I often try. Think, things that are leafy and green, or juicy and fresh, or even cheese that must be sliced and melted, not opened and squeezed.
Phillip Luna, Walking Out
Walking Out seems like it would be the penultimate celebration: the anticipation of free air and space; reunion with family and friends; the ability to participate in the beauty of every day life; and of course, the feasting on favorite food. In his piece, Phillip Luna recognizes the complicated nature of prison matriculation. Like playing Double Dutch, leaving prison requires skill and a sense of timing to jump between two swinging ropes without getting hung up — it’s hard to get the pacing right the first time. Reentry is a celebration tied to a mundane list of important and difficult hurdles that need to be accomplished all at once to restart life. Imagine in two weeks getting a driver’s license, bank account, place to stay, purchase everyday necessities, acquire a cell phone, place to live, learn bus routes, and find a job. The pressure of failing exacerbated by the fear of parole violations and making rent … well, let’s say the long shadow of prison colors everything. The next few pieces illustrate the polarity of carceral life.
Traditions by Jai describes the birthday cards commissioned by prison artists to commemorate another year around the sun:
These visceral symbols of actual
Freedom and desperate longing
Reminders of wasted virility
And times ambiguous cruelty
The inside of the card and back
Covered in scrawled epithets
Eulogies reading like elegies
Thomas Derr’s Celebration twists life ceremonies into a complex dream sequence that turns nightmarish:
We reached the end of the aisle when I stop. Through my tears and the bright lights ahead I find it hard to see. Is she really there? “Don't do it!” she cries as the gavel is swung by the judge. Wait, is this just a Justice of the Peace ceremony? I thought you wanted a chapel wedding like you had dreamed of for years.
Uriah Vargas writes along the edge of the sweet and the bitter. He plays with punctuated language twisting and turning it in his poem Got One Shot:
You only got one shot
Eminem, M&M
Candy sweet opportunity
Sensational
Life can be sweet
Things in life make it seem bitter
During the past few months, we have been talking about adaptation and how making ceremonies inside marks carceral time. Every holiday past and birthday card magnify the importance of prison family. I write this on Juneteenth, a celebration that twists and turns like Uriah’s poem — we mark the release of people who should have never been enslaved. Last Saturday, our friends in Uhuru Sasa at Oregon State Penitentiary hosted family and friends to a feast in a space that still chains people. Despite this bitterness, the joy generated by the community radiates through the walls and fills the prison with sweetness of life and love and the pride of survival. | TDS
Here is a short video produced in 2019 to honor Juneteenth at OSP, features Sterling Cunio’s They Don’t Eat.
What a great edition! Thanks for continuing to publish these great writers.