Terry Hamilton-Poore

At the Jail

Visiting rules are posted, but I miss one.

The piece of paper in my hand: not allowed.

"I don't know where you think you're going with that,"

the guard says, as though

I'm trying to get away with something.

Yes, I was going to use this paper to cut

through the clouded Plexiglas

that keeps me from my firstborn.

No, I was going to set it alight and liquefy

the thick cinder block walls, so he could crawl

through the opening into my arms.

Better:  I was going to use its razored edge to sever

the carotid in the neck of my questioner.

As those eyes glazed with startled death

I'd have stepped lightly over the spreading red pool

and through the security gate, origamied

the forbidden parchment into a skeleton

key, and opened every steel cell,

and all those brothers, sons, husbands,

would have streamed into the arms of their stunned

loved-ones who had thought they were waiting

just for a glimpse, not for the whole package.

And my son, upon being sprung, would have read

the words printed on that perilous sheet of paper-

a job,

a support group,

a halfway house--

and the gears that had gone mysteriously askew

would have slipped suddenly back into place,

and he would have stepped into the sunlight

with his spirit as free now as his body—

but no.

"Well?" she snaps. Quietly I crumple

the paper and drop it into the trash,

hand her my I.D., and step through the gate.

Terry Hamilton-Poore’s poetry has appeared in Echoes, City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, The Marin Anthology, Literary Mamas, and Children, Churches, and Daddies. Her work is informed by her experiences as a daughter, wife, mother, and Presbyterian pastor who has lived and worked at the intersections of poverty and plenty, faith and doubt, in many different regions of the United States.