WHILE YOU ARE LIGHTING UP ON 4/20, I’M SERVING DECADES IN PRISON FOR SELLING WEED

a found poem
by Gordon Gilbert

after an April 20, 2023 Truthout op-ed written by Edwin Rubis

from a federal prison in the hills of Alabama  

Author’s note: Edwin Rubis has served over 24 years of a 40-year sentence in federal prison for a conviction on marijuana charges. 

Editor’s note: April 20, or 4/20 in its calendar denotation, is a holiday celebrated by many weed-smokers both in the United States and around the globe. 

Gordon Gilbert is a poet and playwright living in NYC's west village.

THE CONDITIONAL CASE FOR CONVICTION

by Diana Cole

A patron of a laundromat near Cup Foods watching the Derek Chauvin trial on Monday. Credit: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times, April 6, 2021

for George Floyd

 

 

Nothing can be true, so the dog barks all night

          missing the man who feeds him.

 

Into the fire go the stars. If the garbage is collected

          in the morning, the moon will go too.

 

Without evidence of insects, birds have nothing to eat.

          He’s talking so he’s fine.

 

Nothing but a man, a sizable guy who loves his Mama, 

          who lost his Mama.  

                                    

I kneel in case the sun will intervene in time.

          Inside the car, the back seat is a thick darkness. 

 

A black man could get lost if the air is handcuffed.

          Even if he pleads 20 times, he is under the influence,

 

under suspicion, under the knee, undertaken.

          All for 20 dollars, supposing that, even if, as long as… 

Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has had poems published in numerous journals including Poetry East, Spillway, the Tar River Review, the Cider Press Review, GBH Public Radio, Friends Journal, Verse Daily, and the Main Street Rag, and upcoming in Crab Creek Review. Her chapbook Songs By Heart was published in 2018 by Iris Press. She is an editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal and a member of Ocean State Poets whose mission is to encourage the reading, writing and sharing of poetry. 

HANDS

by Ruth Lehrer

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny makes a heart gesture with his hands while in a cage in the Moscow City Court on Tuesday. His suspended sentence from his 2014 criminal conviction was ultimately converted to a prison term. (Press Service of Simonovsky District Court/Handout/Reuters via CBC)

He’s in a glass box right now they call it the aquarium we can’t hear him 

    can he hear us

the judge pretends to read judgment the news already knows already 

    prints her words

before they exit her mouth leave her tongue like a corrupt mind meld 

    two years eight

months in a prison colony with his silent hands he flashes a heart to his wife 

    who takes

off her mask and waves.

Ruth Lehrer is a writer and sign language interpreter living in western Massachusetts. She is the author of the novel Being Fishkill and the poetry chapbook Tiger Laughs When You Push.

LIFESAVER

by Mark Ward

“Former nurse Niels Högel—who has admitted to giving potentially lethal drugs to patients so he could try to resuscitate them—has been sentenced by a German court to life in prison for murdering 85 people.” —NPR, June 6, 2019. Photo: Högel in court, awaiting his verdict in Oldenburg, Germany. Credit: Hauke-Christian Dittrich/AFP/Getty Images via NPR.

Their bodies ailing,
they flail, fitting,

disrupting the night’s
boredom. I’m there,

knuckles cracked, ready.

They say to compress
to 120

BPM pop songs:
Staying Alive,

Another One Bites

The Dust. The syringe
makes them erupt,

their hearts needing me,
my steady hands.

Most of them come back.

Sometimes the nights push
the plunger down

and their bodies make
one last complaint.

I watch. Do nothing.

Mark Ward is the author of Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cordite, Assaracus, Softblow, and many more. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He is currently working on his first full-length collection, Nightlight.

THIRST

by Mary K O'Melveny

FOUR NO MORE DEATHS VOLUNTEERS FOUND GUILTY FOR PROVIDING LIFE-SAVING HUMANITARIAN AID ON “TRAIL OF DEATH” IN ARIZONA DESERT —No More Deaths, January 18, 2019

I.
What do most of us know of it?
Safe in our homes, cars, streets, sidewalks.
Plastic water bottles piled up,
filling the bellies of sperm whales.

We are half filled with liquids. Yet,
when water vanishes in an
eye blink, thirst is just death’s first sign.
A face reddens. A tongue swells. Limbs

cool, cramp. A brain aches. Eyes sink,
as if they might find liquids still
sloshing about under shrinking skin.
Deluge dreams become delusions.


II.
An Arizona desert turns crime scene.
Not because bodies of immigrants
lie scattered about, bone-thin hands
still clutching their rosaries,

but because someone has placed jugs
of water, cans of beans along
a ragged trail hoping to stave
off more gruesome deaths.

Four women may spend prison time
for desecration of a refuge.
Their water cans ran afoul of
the pristine nature of the place.

III.
Perhaps bodies gathering dust
along an arroyo where final
prayers for salvation once formed
do not amount to misdemeanors.

As dying travelers shed hats,
shirts, backpacks, photographs, sandals,
rangers scooped up remnants of lost
lives like so much tourist trash.

There is no one left to pay fines
for property abandonment
except earnest water bearers.
Our thirst for punishment wins out.


Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press.

SAMIZDAT

by Tracey Gratch

A Russian court has convicted poet and teacher Alexander Byvshev of ‘inciting enmity’ and sentenced him to 300 hours of community service, confiscated his computer and prohibited him from working as a school teacher for two years.  His ‘crime’ – the poem ‘To Ukrainian Patriots’ in which he expresses his opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and suggests Ukrainians should ensure that not one inch of Crimea is handed “to Putin’s chekists”.  —Human Rights in Ukraine (KHPG), July 14, 2015

The storefront windows dim with filth and soot.
Cyrillic, signs hold sway and hang above
the wooden-blocks paving the streets in rot.

In nineteen-twenty-one the husband's shot –
The committee puts its strangle-hold on nearly
everything the others wrote, and thought.

Damp fire-wood and famine, typhus rages
in darkened spaces – their words, to memory,
then burned.  An apartment bare, but for the language,

whispered in the cold rail cars which pass
beneath the towers. Outside a prison's gate,
in the crowd she waits to see her son, for hours.

Here, a crimson-history is wrought:
"Can you describe this?"  She said, "I can."  She thought.


Author’s note: Alexander Byvshev’s situation is reminiscent of the plight of other Russian poets, including Anna Achmatova, (whom the poem is about) in post-revolutionary Russia, when Achmatova's work was officially stifled, though it continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden passed and read in the gulags. With the conviction of Alexander Byvshev it seems that Russia is returning to the practice of censoring  and persecuting its writers for their political views. 

Tracey Gratch lives in Quincy, MA with her husband and their four children. Her poems have appeared in  publications including Mezzo Cammin,  The Literary Bohemian, The Flea, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine,  The New Verse News and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Her poem, "Strong Woman" is included in the American College of Physicians, On Being A Doctor, Volume 4.

HE WON MAJOR SCORN

by Jan D. Hodge

Image source: Chumpmonkey's Electronic Cartoonatorium

There was such acid in his smile
And such hardness in his thought,
It was no wonder what deep chill
His conviction brought.

Never considering that words
Extracted from attitudes adjusted
By stress positions and waterboards
Were not to be trusted,

He spoke with infinite scorn
At those who discredited his view,
Lip curled, sullen and smugly stern,
Unbeautiful, untrue.

Not one to retreat from truculence,
Even a change of heart changed nothing.
We are vexed at such intransigence
And such deep loathing.


Jan D. Hodge has had poems published in Western Wind (5th ed.), Writing Metrical Poetry, and many print and online journals, including North American Review, New Orleans Review, Iambs & Trochees, Defined Providence, IthacaLit, and South Coast Poetry Journal.  His double dactyl renderings of Shakespeare, nursery stories, and tales from the Arabian Nights have appeared in the American Arts Quarterly website, Lavender Review, Off the Coast, Light Quarterly, Kiss and Part, Poetry Revolt, and Umbrella Journal.  The title of this poem anagrams John Crowe Ransom, whose "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" obviously served as the model for the poem.