Nathan Erwin

ANOTHER DREAM OF PRISON

A man, in shadow, sits
in the corner of his cell.
He opens his hand
& feels on the outside
of everything. He hears
the drip of pipe in the walls
& mistakes it for his father’s voice,
 his house moving
with the falling leaves.

He closes his hand
& sees the greenwood
pond of his childhood,
beaver kits delirious 
from suckling,
wild garlic, 
flowering crab apple.
He rolls his dice 
made of mud
across the metal floor
& the roaches scurry, 
like everyone in line 
during the armed robbery. 
Two sixes again
 & again.
      You see him
& think— O, what a pity.

He looks down at you,
his cellmate,
so small on the floor,
& smiles softly. 

Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. An institutional organizer, Erwin currently operates at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for indigenous farmers and organizing around the 2023 Farm Bill and tribal land repatriation. His writing has recently appeared in The Journal, Willow Springs, FOLIO, Poet Lore, and Ninth Letter. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about land, medicine, myths, and wanting.