Free Doing Time by Bell Gale Chevigny Page B

triumph over the state’s possession of their years with irony, bravado, or a moment of pure rapture. Chuck Culhane does all three in “After Almost Twenty Years”; his darker poem “There Isn’t Enough Bread” registers the collapse of such resources. Roger Jaco’s “Killing Time” pits the recall of the world’s rich calendar against the flattened time of prison.
    The possibility of doing “good time” to reduce one’s sentence and win parole sometimes enables the state to manipulate prisoners by appropriating their future. (“Lee’s Time” in Race, Chance, Change dramatizes the moral crises such control can generate.) Here Diane Hamill Metzger illuminates the tortuous effects on prisoners of a system that teases prisoners’ expectations through indeterminate sentences, the hope of clemency, or the phantom of parole. In the face of the growing movement to eliminate parole, however, Larry Bratt offers a sharply differing point of view from Metzger’s.
    Exactly how J. R. Grindlay’s “Toledo Madman” expected the sparrows to help him escape remains a tantalizing mystery, and the author is dead. But the Madman finds “ultimate freedom” by electing insanity and becoming master of his own time.
Reductions
    William Aberg
Afternoons, in this plague
of flies and white, Sonoran heat, we rarely sing —
to be honest, not at
all- The porter unrolls the hose
and waters the dirt to keep it from blowing
up in our faces when the southern winds
hit. Crouched on the walk
outside our cells, we keep busy
lying about what we would do
if a woman appeared
to us, her lips a coarse violet
wanting each one of us
    right now. Or how easily
we could distract the guard
from his perch on the guntower —
one fake fight
and wc would make it
over the tence before the count
officer found us missing. I remember
one cynic, locked up
twelve years, spat tobacco
in a paper cup, pushed up the brim
of his cap, and told us
    the jagged range
of mountains outside the prison
fence marked the edge
of the world, and the sky
was .simply a revolving backdrop
someone painted with clouds
and stars. We laughed
but for him, it was the truth:
there could be no other world.
    1982, Arizona State Prison-Santa
    Rita Tucson, Arizona
Where or When
Jackie Ruzas
    Huddled under a tent with strangers,
my woolen clothes soaking wet.
Sharks swim undisturbed over cars, grass,
and concrete dividers.
    Hiding in a tree I watch Mom argue with
the seltzer man. He enters my yard. I climb
down from the tree into — a prison yard
where Frankie “Bones” and Georgie Bates
are playing gin with comic size Alice in Wonderland
cards. Their bodies petrified, clay like
resembling Homo Antiquitus in the Hamburg Museum.
I pass them by.
    The yard becomes a winding road, desolate.
I walk and walk as seasons fall behind me and
voices fill the night.
    1985, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
    Ossining, New York
An Overture
M. A.Jones
    Something in the darkness
has given birth to a sky
spinning with a fierce impossible light. Here
night and day have different sounds,
the seasons varying textures. We could say
it’s October. On a sidewalk
that goes somewhere blue plaid sweaters
float above the hands of lovers
dampening the crisp air. They sweep
past walls privileged with windows,
transparence lit with small faces, a hush
a hand opening. This story begins
    and ends in separate places, with interruptions
where sun-veiled women step out
of themselves, fall
then lift andante, continuing …in this story
there’s always the possibility of morning,a chance
that the screams which drip down at midnight
are not really threatening
but wishing us well,
wishing us a life
in another story.
    1979, Arizona State Prison-Florence
    Florence, Arizona
Vivaldi on the Far Side of the Bars
M. A. Jones
    for William Aberg
    Maybe nothing can save us tonight,
not love or religion
or the needle that comes to us
in sleep