1. What he Did in Solitary
Named all the state capitals
Sang as much of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as he had tattooed on his eardrums, which was all of it
Tugged, instead of magician’s scarves, blinking Christmas lights from somewhere deep inside him
And strung them in spirals up and down his prison bars
Realized Edmund Dantès, in the Château d’If, was imprisoned in the Castle of Possibility
Listed the five best Mexican places he’d eaten at
Thought hard about the first love he ever touched until the scent reappeared on his index and middle
Pared his nails with his teeth and kept going until he bled
Used the blood to paint the butterfly from Papillon on his breastbone
Laid his ear on different parts of the floor and walls to see if footsteps or earthquakes might transmit from somewhere
Plugged the drain with two fistfuls of hair and filled the sink with water because every garden walling in an innocent should have a birdfeeder
Played with himself
Lost interest
Listed all the Presidents
Palmed his scalp to feel his hair grow
Thumbed his eyelids up so his helium-filled eyeballs could float out of their sockets on yellowish neural tethers
Scraped the bricks with his teeth to fill his navel with brick grit so that one of his fingernails, potted, might grow into a hand
Did a hundred squats
Imagined himself in his boyhood’s public library so hard the bricks became the spines of Tolkien novels stacked to the ceiling
Hunted the corners and under the cot for a spider to talk to
Monologued mightily, making appeals to logic and mercy that would have gotten him acquitted
Prayed, hands together, on his knees, for deliverance from his own company
Shouted at the ceiling
Took a deep breath, pursed his lips, pinched his nose, and blew out, bursting both tympanic membranes with a sound so gunshotlike it reminded him of home
Made shapes with his tongue in the mirror until his tongue, finally, after hundreds of attempts, forked
Stood on his hands until he got a headache
Sobbed
Realized he’d left out John Tyler and listed all the Presidents again
Whistled and patted his thighs as if his beagle Ben were running back to him
Spoke both parts in a stage play of his own making about the Rodney King riots
Lunged at the Saran-wrapped sandwich slid through the slit in his cell door, hoping hungrily to glimpse his jailor’s human hand
Congratulated himself on making it to lunch
Peeled the Saran wrap off the sandwich
Ate
2. What he Dreamed in Solitary
A windowless shed the size of an airplane hangar where birds were bred flightless
Twenty treadmills in a row and twenty rich men running
His old house in East Cleveland, seen from the backseat cage of a slowing cop car, his mom sitting on the lawn
And she got up and rushed to him arms out but her choke chain jerked taut
A prayer rug made of flowing water
A kufi made of his brother’s caul
Bees crawling in and out of the windows of Terminal Tower
His brother fetal position kicked by six cops, but his clever body smoking into its own atoms all around them, rising like dust beaten from an old mattress
His old house in East Cleveland with the snow on its roof dyed the color of rocket ice by cop-car lights
A prison island off the coast of Sweden where murderers were whittling owls and rapists were doing collages
A state-of-the-art walkway over an abyss, its floor made of one long glass screen that showed the drop below it once a day
So when cracks shot through it and he started screaming, everyone else thought it was part of the experience, laughing and getting it on their phones
Twenty lounge chairs in a row and twenty rich girls sunning
Him dressed in boy shorts and ankle shackles, balancing their wine coolers on a tray, forbidden to sip
The old house in East Cleveland with his brother sitting astride the roof in a captain’s hat, face to the wind, excelsior
A concrete mixer with bodies mixed in, pouring a public sculpture where the bodies, trying to emerge, harden into place in attitudes of anguish grasping skyward
Twenty rich couples strolling their kids through this park to teach them about civil rights
And him equipped with nothing but a hammer and a pen, checking the faces of these figures for his brother
Until the light changes and the concrete bodies softening to marble become those unfinished sculptures of Michelangelo known as The Prisoners
Only they aren’t emerging, they’re returning to their blocks
As he is now, a catnap Rip van Winkle, twenty minutes and his beard is past his knees
Awakening in solitary yet again
3. What he Drew in Solitary
An occult chalk outline of his brother on the floor, a gap where his mouth should have gone, for black ants to file through like song notes
Illustrations for a pop-up book for blinded boys, you turn the page and run your fingers airily along a wall
Crooked white fences between himself and despair, four finger-length fenceposts and a cross slash, repeated all the way around
A single eye on a single brick, his brother keeping watch through an observation slit
Dashed lines of a flea-flicker from John Madden Football they played as a boy
One of those dashed lines wandering off toward the ceiling, X marks the spot
A treasure map from the Château d’If to the island of Only
Shin-high sunflowers seed-stippled with Vicodins
A sun for those sunflowers, too, so ghostly pale it turned into a moon at night
And made the water level in the toilet bowl subside and rise in tides
A shin-high cross beside the dead-end road where boyhood crashed, killing his brother, leaving him the sole survivor
Cursed to grow into a grown man slack-limbed on a prison cot
Quadriplegic, unable to stand, unable to stand this
Wanderlust butane-torching ulcers in his flesh
While lust expresses, expels itself in chalk-dust teardrops on his palm
Drawing him deeper into self-erasure, gaunt body, hunted skin, drawn face
Illuminating the scripture of his solitude, in which there is only one God, one way
And that way, inward
To the fund of images he draws on, replenished every evening by a distant indulgent father
Making up for his longlostness with these lengths of chalk, these drawings in the dark
Basilica Basquiats in his brother’s nightstick-fractured skull
Exposed to sunlight by a pipe bomb laid in his boy body’s inviolate Vatican
Illustrations, lustrations in the cloister, bareback Jackson-Pollocked with a penitential whip
Here in his cell, in solitary, fighting himself to a draw
Drawing sustenance, drawing from the well, drawing his family like a treasure map from memory, drawing in the face of faces turned away forever
Breath
Breath
Breath