(for Kenny) Awake before the sun, I fill the little white cup you gifted me in parting last night with freeze-dried Colombian instant coffee, the aroma robust and earthy and South American exotic. The dusty vents spew ice this morning. I shake, and I spill powdery white creamer along its chilly lip, on the dull tile floor. Leave the taste of French vanilla for the ants today. My resealable bag of cappuccino crinkles between slender brown fingers rippling from my locker throughout the dorm, tickling sleeping ears. I pause. Scoop. Red safety lights glow ominously overhead, a tenebrous warning: pivot! you are alone now, as I tap the steel nozzle. I hiss, pull back for it is hot, ripe for the taking like the old blankets discarded on your bunk, browned with stray coffee. I drown the mixture in steaming water and it, like us, becomes changed entirely—a mélange both congenital and external. On my way back, I pause, look left. Your empty bunk jars me; I expect your body like a felled tree in the sad space you called home. Both hands wrapped tightly around your little white cup, I cherish its newfound warmth tempered by insipid chestnut-stained plastic. There is no mattress no body nobody no scattered belongings hanging haphazardly from the tray up top. There is only me, an eddy of snores, and this little cup. I snap on the pale red sip-lid, slide white latch open. Scent sighs into the air, cloying and nostalgic and like you leaving, inescapable. I sip. III. (after Mary Oliver and MARINA) 1. Wrapped neatly, loosely, tied delicately with light white yarn and smoky gloom heavy, I peered down intently into the tiny box filled with starving darkness Leo presented last Fourth of July. How fitting, reasonable, thoughtful to gift plain death to loved ones, seasoned with ascetic apology marinated all spring in whiskey and cocaine, on Independence Day. (God… bless America!) 2. I jumped in… deep. Fleshy feast for lustrous thick black. Ignominy aside— vast emptiness is fecund obdurate voracious. Loquacious and soporific its tendrils are congenital ardent like dormant viral infection. A cake walk: to be human. The box is a gun. 3. Food for maudlin white flowers. We, the leftovers, often querulous. Through the lachrymal fog— its ossified fingers both searching & guiding— mewls a fatherless cherub pink vulnerable sibylline coddled in soft expansive darkness the fastidious gray specter of death —miasmic in his ubiquity, his effrontery redoubtable— howls in cold wind. In dewy grass: neonatal innocence. The most prudent use of sorrow: to love recklessly.
Kashawn Taylor (he/him) holds a BA in English and Psychology and an MA in English and Creative Writing. Before his incarceration, he established a strong academic foundation, which he has continued to build upon during his time in prison. His “prison writing” has been featured in several publications, including Prison Journalism Project, The Blotter Magazine, Minutes Before Six, Evening Street Review’s DIY Prison Project, and Indiana Review. His first collection, subhuman, is now available.
