Poem of the Week: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Prison


Prison is the sinner’s bouquet, house of shredded & torn
................Dear John letters, upended grave of names, moon
................Black kiss of a pistol’s flat side, time blueborn
& threaded into a curse, Lazarus of hustlers, the picayune
Spinning into beatdowns; breath of a thief stilled
................By fluorescent lights, a system of 40 blocks,
................Empty vials, a hand full of purple cranesbills,
Memories of crates suspended from stairs, tied in knots
Around street lamps, the house of unending push-ups,
................Wheelbarrels & walking 20s, the daughters
................Chasing their father’s shadows, sons that upset
The wind with their secrets, the paraphrase of fractured,
................Scarred wings flying through smoke, each wild hour
................Of lockdown, hunger time & the blackened flower.


-Reginald Dwayne Betts

From Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010)

Used by permission.

A Cave Canem Fellow, R. Dwayne Betts is 2010 Soros Justice Fellow and winner of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Debut for his memoir, A Question of Freedom. He has won a Holden Fellowship, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Fellowship. His first collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award given by Alice James Books in 2010. His poetry and essays have been published in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, the Washington Post, the ABA Journal and other national literary magazines, periodicals and newspapers.

Betts attended Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2008.

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