Week #10—Improv #2
And Ever
by Jake Adam York
You rise
to watch the leaves
breathe light to their edges
and burn,
drawing day from the night
to wake the birds.
You’ve learned this sound,
white chord of a filling lung
that will set the wren to sing,
so you rise,
only today
it isn’t leaves.
It’s a moth you’ve never seen,
its wings
not flock, not felt,
but paper,
hundreds, thousands
of photographs
flickering in your breath
then falling,
each into its own light,
another pair of wings.
Death Row
by Pauline Rodwell
They pray
to see another day
deliver forgiveness,
so they eat
for strength
to make the final walk.
They’ve only learned to go on,
to watch days, hours, and minutes
tick toward rejection
or redemption—only the designated day
will decide
by phone call or silence,
now or later.
Reprieve will prolong torture,
confirmation—relief.
The limbo between life and death
magnifies,
like cancer
cells under the microscope
of their minds, their kind,
wounded
at the beginning,
which has yet to come.
Something that’s always interested me more than the possible, and I would imagine somewhat rare, pardon for a death row prisoner is the actual waiting these guys are forced to undergo. Not that I think you want a future draft to delve into any sort of political miasma—insofar as the work’s concern with the morality of capital punishment, which is something I doubt anyone could answer, and it’s just too big besides. What I would be interested to see more of, however, is a bit more specifics relating to this sense of timelessness at the end of an individual life. Just weird facets of the bureaucracy behind prescriptive death—like the fact that these guys are watched to make sure they don’t kill themselves, and the the weird questions that arise through the investigation thereof. Also, where do you see this whole death row thing taking you? Is waiting on death row really like a terminal diagnosis? How might you play with some of the inevitable discrepancies? Who’s going to call, for instance, with a pardon? I’m just really interested in the possible leaps you might take from this draft’s premise.
ReplyDeletePauline, I’d like to know where you got the inspiration to write about death row. This interests me. First, I’d like to comment on the line format you have chosen for this one, it works well for this piece as it spaces out the information. The reader is intrigued to continue reading from one line to the next to find out what happens. Favorite lines are “the limbo between life and death magnifies like cancer.” Excellent use of similes here and the last line “at the beginning which has yet to come,” provides an eerie-like feeling for the ending. Keep going; I love this title more than anything.
ReplyDeleteSheila