The Rack and The Screw
In stout beds dreaming in cells stale and brimming
with the morning syllables of aging recusants,
we hide prayer beads or drugs in our cassocks or jumpsuits,
passing stone blocks and concrete painted in panic and pity
to hide another vision of control, of camera orbs scanning,
or the papal reflection of the all-embracing eye.
We turn and wake in pale sheets, in our sensitive needs yard,
as gang dropout birds with round pupils and black beaks
gorge on light in the sill, as high-profile queers with soft snarls
of submission to spark the shared electric yellow air.
Prowling the steel fields, still totems felled like timber ghosts
and carved to cast our sloth-like shuffling shadows,
and our resting place of rocks behind bars,
where safe and erect with castle whimsy, our liquor tears swell the border.
We hear the hushed capital crimes shamble by, chains clinking,
inmates punished to rot on the vine, their family tattoos
shriveling in the dark grottos of decades orphaned
of all but circular motion.
We mouth a language mined for grace, the informants, the sex
offenders, the targeted ones, with filthy loaves of tongue,
well-rehearsed cover stories offered and refined,
slaves to violence tumbling in the locks
to find a way out.
The exit signs hiss and flicker
in their teasing mockery of radiance.
The raven in our window transmogrifies guilt.
Widowers inside, we bow our heads to show reverence
to this yard, our reliquary of endangered species
apart from the primeval, cosmic radiation of gen pop,
and the state’s due process of our fears.
We close our eyes to another sun and eat the iridescent,
perfumed feathers of salvation, a ransom high enough
to make an airfoil of dark, shimmery wings
for lift to evade the death rattle of our lot,
to rise above the barbed towers and fences
that are full of veiled, corn-fed eyes
and fattened with alloys of lead and brass.
Mikal Wix grew up in the South. The place seeded insights into many outlooks, including visions of a revenant from the closet. He studies literature and anthropology and has recent work in Penumbra Literary Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Angel Rust Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Hyacinth Review, & works as a science editor.
