by Trina Gaynon
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| The late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, seen here smiling during a 2021 court appearance, never lost his sense of optimism and joie de vivre behind bars, says Ilia Krasilshchik, a Russian journalist who exchanged letters with him in prison. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images via CBC). |
If they’re told to feed you caviar tomorrow, they’ll feed you caviar.If they’re told to strangle you in your cell, they’ll strangle you.
Exile begins when the law is broken.
Don’t let them tell you your arrest
will be followed by a bail hearing.
There will only be bank accounts seized
and a shuffling between prisons,
There will only be a pen and paper,
sometimes held up to prison windows
by your attorneys, sometimes transmitted
through an outdated digital system.
Don’t let them tell you there will be
a trial, an impartial jury, an unbiased judge.
There will only be executioners slipping
poison into your tea, shoving a knife
into vital organs as you walk the streets,
or releasing a little nerve gas in your cell.
Don’t let them tell you death will erase you,
every sacrifice in vain. Call out the lie.
Trina Gaynon's poems recently appeared in Poetry East, Tomahawk Creek Review, and Clepsydra. More can be found in The Power of the Feminine I, Volume 1, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, other anthologies, numerous journals, and a chapbook An Alphabet of Romance from Finishing Line. She received an MFA in Creative Writing at University of San Francisco. A past volunteer for literacy programs in local libraries and WriteGirl in Los Angeles, she currently leads a group of poetry readers at the Senior Studies Institute in Portland.