ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Alicia Cole is a writer and artist in Huntsville, AL. She lives with her husband, three animals, and five plants. Twice-exceptional, autistic, bisexual, genderfluid, and a practitioner of nontraditional religions, she’s also a survivor. She’s the editor of Priestess & Hierophant Press, the Interviews Editor of Black Fox Literary Magazine, and an intern for 256 Magazine. Her work has appeared in TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, concis, Atlas & Alice, Split Lip Magazine, and isacoustic*, among other publications. She’s been a finalist for Best of the Net, won Honorable Mention in Hermeneutic Chaos’ Jane Lumley Prize for Emerging Writers, been selected as Longform’s Fiction of the Week, and been a resident at both the Lillian E. Smith Center for Creative Arts and at SAFTA’s Writers Coop, Firefly Farms.
Visiting Him in Jail
Lock. It's all about a lock
and a key that just can't fit.
Sign the book. Hand over
your ID. Take the long walk
with his mother in skirt;
sari is later, sari is what she
buys before you eat dosa
together off the money
he gives her for her birthday,
off the money for the books.
Take the long walk down
the long hallway that is lit
bright in a way you're certain
it's not lit where he is.
He is sharp as he is always
sharp and his eyebrows
are piercing. And you wish
to kiss him through the plexi.
The green isn't bad on him.
Nothing is bad on him,
the smell of him rising,
which you can't smell
but can always smell,
like his father making
bitter melon drenched in spice.
Why is there so much brown
here and do you have to lay
with brown to understand,
to throw your body visibly
at the glass and demand
if you see me will you let him
free. Let me bargain
with the jailer. Let me trade
my white skin for safety.
We put the money
on his books, we book
visitation appointments.
I cannot find the right key.
And he is smoking in jail.
And I am white.
And white is a pitiful color.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
