THERE WAS A FACE

by j.lewis

Image source: ACLU Capital Punishment Project

Former Eagle Scout set to be executed for Alabama killing

—Fox News, December 7, 2016

two and twenty years ago
one life went out
with details that are
of course, on record

the extinguisher
one score and two years later
after all appeals have failed
sits on the infamous row
while a state plays
mother may i with scotus
anxious to finally do
unto him what he did
unto another

i am not from alabama
cannot even tell you
where i was that day
when one life and some
unimportant sum of money
were taken in huntsville
video rolling, rolling

today i saw his face
where else but on facebook
an absolutely ordinary face
and when i asked google
for details, for explanation
there was the face again
over a caption from fox
that called him
a former eagle scout

and i wondered
how does one become
a former eagle scout
is there a ceremony
a court of dishonor
that strips away
all merit, all honor
as if to say
we never knew you

and would that hurt
any less than dying
or would the former scout
even care at this point
knowing how determined
a certain state can be
when they want to be sure
you remain forever unable
to reclaim that eagle

Editor’s Postscript: Ronald Smith was executed on December 8, 2016. See “Alabama's cruel and unusual execution of Ronald Smith” —Scott Martelle, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2016

j.lewis is an internationally published poet, musician, and nurse practitioner. His poems have appeared online and in print in numerous journals from California to Nigeria to the UK. a clear day in october, his first collection of poetry and photography was published in June 2016. A chapbook is forthcoming from Praxis Magazine in early 2017.

ALABAMA JUSTICE

by Wilda Morris

Anthony Ray Hinton free after nearly 30 years on Alabama Death Row —AL.com

     For Anthony Ray Hinton

“the ball of free will dropped from my hand”

~ Ishmael, in Moby Dick by Herman Melville

black male, poor
innocent, as if that matters
when the DA wants a crime solved quickly

call him a suspect
find his mother’s gun
from which the bullets were not fired
stuff him in a cell

don’t worry if his lawyer
is inadequate
don’t worry if his expert witness
is so inexpert he can hardly see
through the forensic microscope
has little experience in ballistics
is so lamentable the jury
laughs at him

ask for the death penalty
send him off to prison
to live in solitary on death row

without his family
without his friends
without his free will

fight all the way to the Supreme Court
to keep him there

until after his mother is dead
after his youth is gone
after he has almost forgotten
the feel of a loving touch
after decades of not making
significant decisions

when the court bounces
the ball of free will back to his hands
after thirty years


Wilda Morris, a past president of Illinois State Poetry Society, is workshop chair of Poets & Patrons of Chicago. She has won awards for free verse and formal poetry and haiku. She leads poetry workshops for children and for adults and has been widely published. She is retired from a career of teaching graduate student and coordinating a not-for-profit peace and justice organization. Her blog provides monthly contests for poets.

WHO'S IT FROM? WHAT'S INSIDE?

by Melisa "Misha" Cahnmann-Taylor

You Receive A Present From Someone You Haven’t Seen In A Long Time. 

Who’s It From? What’s Inside?

---Writing prompt at Jubilee Partners ESOL Program

for Refugees, Comer, Ga.

This Congolese boy describes hide and seek with a twist.  The Finder must shoot the Found with a “to-PI-co.”   I draw the sling’s “Y” shot, and we review adjectives: playful, violent.  They use seeds, not rocks. He swears it’s not a violent game he’s missing with his friends.  Maybe just the culture of boys playing.  Already a man at 17, mothered by his sister while the split family grieves over a sibling’s typhoid, a missing father.  A mother in Texas grieves.  She let her boy play with neighbors whose chambers held loaded handguns.  The yellow tape.  The no return.  She preaches we ask before sending children on playdates to unsafe houses.  Foam swords.  Squirt guns.  Games that allow the player to spell bomb so one appears and blows holes through a virtual wall.  A boy-almost-a-man, 21, rented our house while we lived in Mexico.  I didn’t know he hunted.  He demanded his full deposit though he’d punched a hole through my son’s door.  I patched it, he argued.  It better be good enough.  Slight threat as he insisted I search for his lost fishing hooks. It’s better to withdraw where there are bullets.  But what do you do when your village is burned? Do you get the deposit back? Do you offer a limb? A daughter or son? While one remembers a war-toy, another girl conjures a pair of green shoes.  Imagination’s tucked into every child like a hidden coin or buried like a sandbox in concrete.  This boy has 2 months before he’s to pay rent, find a job, buy his own shoes in this confusing and green country. The Christian volunteers were to bury a Death Row inmate and the Salvadorans insisted they’d shovel better. Unable to bury their own, they moved earth for our discarded men. Éste por mi mama.  Éste por mi papa. They slung red clay in the rhythms of a clapping game.

Melisa "Misha" Cahnmann-Taylor is Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Program Chair of TESOL & World Language Education at the University of Georgia. She is the winner of Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes and a Leeway Poetry Grant, and has co-authored two books, Teachers Act Up: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre and Arts-Based Research in Education.  She has published numerous articles, and poetry about language learning and teacher education.  Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Women’s Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Barrow Street, Puerto Del Sol, Mom Egg, and many other literary homes.  She judges the annual Anthropology & Humanism poetry contest.

WARDEN, MURDER ME

by Allyson Whipple

The following is a found poem based on “Last Words of the Condemned” by Celina Fang, Manny Fernandez, Amy Padnani and Ashwin Seshagiri in The New York Times, June 29, 2013.

Photos provided to the Times by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

I.

I wish I could die more than once

            to tell you how sorry I am.

I am the sinner of all sinners.

I deserve this.

            Tell everyone

                        I said goodbye.

Let’s roll. Lord Jesus

            receive my spirit.

I love all those on Death row.

            I will always hold them

                        in my hands.

II.

No one wins tonight.

            They are killing me tonight.

No one gets closure.

            They are murdering me tonight.

No one walks away victorious.

Let’s do it, man.

            Lock and load.

                        Ain’t life a bitch.

III.

Bury me deep, lay two speakers

            at my feet,

put some headphones on my head,

            rock and roll me when I’m dead.

I walked in here

            like a man.

I am leaving

            like a man.

It’s a good day to die.

I can feel it,

taste it,

not bad.

Allyson Whipple is the director of the Austin Feminist Poetry Festival and the author of We're Smaller Than We Think We Are (Finishing Line Press). Her work has most recently appeared in the 2014 Texas Poetry Calendar.