Brian Batchelor

Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020

A DISCOURSE ON WHY INMATES EXIT PRISON WORSE THAN WHEN THEY WENT IN

Bet you thought there was no such thing
as too kind. I can't write it into this poem
without admitting kindness is a synonym
for "too close" when its nectared syllables
sap these prison walls. O kindness,

lotus flowering muddy waters, I can't
call on your greening nature, your bloom
that fruits into song, into breath, in
a place rotting under unnatural light,

where a staff member who's friendly
toward inmates is slurred a "murder groupie,"
asked if they've hugged their thug today,

where they are disciplined for embracing
the blues out of an inmate, compassioning the self
back into the self, making him a tower of human.
Those 5 seconds of what miracles a May's worth
of good seeds back into a chest is an offensehere, dear Reader. I remember when

humaneness lived inside my body
like a community garden, every visitor
welcome & nourished in their coming
& going, all those bright hues among us,
but goddamn if our bodies haven't become borders.

I have let knapweed root
& wrangle what will no longer grow.
------------------
THE SELF AS A CONTRADICTION

After seeing a photo of me
for the first time, my Love's dad
squints behind glasses at his daughter's
phone, shakes preconceptions from
his seen-it-all silver head, says
I'm too much of a pretty boy
to be in prison. "It's a shame"
he tells his eldest who calls me
a beautiful man even though
she knows the raked mess composting
my history, the stench seeping
through dark earth I've swallowed
to ghost what I still can't confront
after 18 years. I want to tell her dad
I'm a deception & as confused
as he is, that I'm in perpetual
proximity to the once me. No,
I am not innocent.

I am not innocent. Truth is,
I'm a good gardener & prune
my faults perfect to offset
the off smell. I'm a bouquet
stunning every fresh grave, taming
all that ugly boxed in buffed wood
the sun will never shine. I'm just
another attractive exterior distracting
from what refuses to make sense.

It's simply a matter of nature,
how my Love's dad interprets
my face, how the sun
I hardly ever feel keeps me
young, preserves the youth I wore
to prison as a teenage lifer, how
I am only a trick of no light.
-------------
MY LUNGS IMAGINE THEMSELVES
Date: 3/9/20

as unreliable nostrils.
All they know is air funked

with farts & crude coughs
& unrestrained sneezing

& man-muck. Antique metal
fans snarling on cobwebbed walls

make a good wind to blow
thick flocks of dust

all over the cell hall
like incessant fallout. I can't tell

if what shallows my breath
is learned restraint or

the body's natural impulse
to reject what it can't take.

I'm told the outdoors are
a privilege here, that

no inmate is guaranteed a clean
inhale of what gives life.

My insides haven't been baptized
by fresh air in 6 months.

I blow my nose & out swarm
a gob of blackflies.
-----------------
APOLOGY, IN DEFEAT

White boxers torn & knotted
around broken & taped-together plastic hangers
in a makeshift pole
become a sign of surrender
I wave through my bars.

Brothers, we share a creased
history of hatred between
our brows, formed thin
& slack lips as protest
when force-fed the stale
bread of promised reform.
We have comingled too long
in the mangle of discarded
bodies "justice" has made us.

I swear I've worn
the thick hide that makes men
tough to chew, withstood
the razor wire gnashing
of this prison's feasting,
its decades fevered
with the marinade
of my proud bones.

I have made a skimpy meal
feeding on bitter skinsI peel from the curdled mess
of what persists, the constant
punishment & punishment.

I'm sorry. I have grown
lean from eating defeat.
-------------
from DISFIGURED HOURS
Date: 3/9/20

this corpse house, this
catacombs of rot chambers

embalmed with sin-wrapped bodies,
this building of gravestones,

this open casket nobody cries
over, this zombieland, this

boneyard of metal bars
& bad sons where

to practice death
is to practice freedom

Brian Batchelor is a poet and artist currently working on a chapbook of illuminated poems. He is a member of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective and has been an avid participant in workshops taught by writers from the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He was born in 1983 in the tiny town of Washington, D.C. When he doesn’t have a paint brush in his hand, a nice cheap Bic pen takes its place. Albert Camus said it best: “A man’s life is nothing but an extended trek though the detours of art to recapture those one or two moments when his heart first opened.”