Take a peek into my life—the life of a woman who fell apart, got back up, fell down, got back up again, got knocked down, and remains getting up, never losing her hope, faith, and determination.

I am a 46-year-old African American woman. I was raised in a single-parent household and never met my father. I can’t recall the exact age, but I do know that I was under ten when my adult male cousin molested me. ...more

After our ceremonies a few of us
Crossed Puget Sound to MacNeill Island
To the grim fortress where the Brotherhood
Of American Indian prisoners had donated
To help our intertribal spiritual gathering.
I held my breath as the iron doors
Slid and clanked behind us, but
Through an open door down the hall
The pounding of a drum, lusty voices sang— ...more

I walked into the small, overheated, stuffy office for our weekly staff meeting. Andrea, the rector, was there, her gangly body looking uncomfortable on the wooden office chair, her pinched sour face more unpleasant than usual, and her short mousy hair typically unkempt. The light from the window behind her dazzled my eyes, making it hard to look her in the face. To her left sat Frank, ...more

SEVENTEEN YEARS ago, I was thrown into a cell in the Segregation Unit at Holman prison for conspiring to escape. I felt as if I had been pitched head first into the open jaws of a monster, a monster whose roar was the sound of steel banging against steel; whose moan, the whispering of schemers late into the night; whose cry, the whimper of tortured souls shadowboxing demons; and whose smell, a rank mixture of rat shit, body odor, urine, and disinfectant. The gullet of this beast—a narrow hall ankle-deep in trash and bits of food—fed nightly armies of roaches and mice. ...more

[The author is on death row in Ohio.]

Fragments of free life
roam distant memory
calling
angels to stop the movie.

Twinkle of daybreak
outs shadowy darkness
bringing
fourteen hundred forty minutes of confusion. ...more

The convicts and I, a volunteer, sit in a circle in the prison. We do this every Thanksgiving. Eyes closed, we imagine sitting around a table in a clearing surrounded by a woods in which the parts of ourselves we have exiled live a furtive life.

We sense inside for any exile who might feel safe enough with us now to step out of the woods and join us at the feast. ...more