MEASURING MOONS

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

In the anthology Prisons Have A Long Memory (created with the Ground Beneath Us group at Oregon State Penitentiary during Covid) editor Jimmy Kashi wrote, “I struggle with my mother’s mortality I struggle for my mother who puts on a brave face, /who hopes not to die till her son is free.” This past weekend, Jimmy’s mother joined him at the grill during Lakota Oyate-Ki’s Pow Wow at Oregon State Penitentiary. For this family, cooking together and caring for their friends, their family — and in this case, their adopted family — comes naturally. Jimmy is the president of the Asian Pacific Family Club, and it was his honor to help his Lakota brothers with the cooking in order that they might attend to their guests. The conditions at OSP provide special opportunities to keep people attached to their people at home and to the cultural traditions that bind them to ancestry.

Nonetheless, long- and life-sentences guarantee that familial lines are difficult if not impossible to keep tied in prison. The stress of separation produces lasting psychological and emotional consequence for both prisoners and family members alike. Kosal So’s homage to her feet, makes a visceral connection:  “I am my mother’s flesh and blood locked behind the concrete and bars, without, the chance to wash the feet that carried me.” When the familial bond is disrupted, a new way of being in relationship to one another must be learned. There is a yearning for our people, a heartache for how things were before the separation. Some people will manage to redefine and rework their relationships. Others will turn away. These dynamics are complicated. They evolve as people move through time served.

For those of us who have lost someone important, a parent, a sibling, a child, grieving time is marked on a different calendar. The absence is profound, made particularly poignant by distance and inaccessibility. In Child of the Diaspora AbdurRashid Al’Wadud describes grieving for his mother: “Minutes turned to hours. Hours turned to days. Days turned to weeks. I fell into a funk of being.” AbdurRashid makes his way through the grieving with scholarship and prayer.

Nolan James Briden (who recently suffered a great loss) has no choice but to write himself forward. The writing isn’t always ink rolling across smooth paper though. Working through the emotions can feel like writing on sandpaper; it requires patience and putting things away for a time, then coming back with some distance. May 16 + Nine-Moons joins a growing stack of poems and prayers dedicated to his mother. Here, time is the refrain that connects Nolan to his mother — she carried him, and now he shifts his weight to carry her, measuring out the moons.

From Coffee Creek in Wilsonville, Michelle Ehlers writes about the loss of her brother, and the devastation it wrought in her life in Stay with Me.We read the struggle in Michelle’s line lengths and rhyme scheme. After many years later, the recounting still contains the uneasy telling of the unresolved.  | TDS