Our poet this week is Somerville Bagel Bard Alice Weiss.  She is formerly from New Orleans,  Louisiana, earned her living as a civil rights attorney for twenty one years, among other things, investigating and challenging the conditions of jails in parishes throughout the Atchafalaya Basin and the Bayous.

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Seeing

‘chafalaya basin bayou town
twelve stores and a courthouse:
you can hardly see the jail on the roof
like a squirrel’s nest, crumbling in the V
of  the winter sycamores,
all spring and summer
you didn’t know was there.

Up on the fifth floor, Warden’s proud
of the negro day cell, bucks he knows
how they fight, like cocks
till they’re down and bleedin’
He brings his homeboys
up from Doc’s bar in the early night
winning beaucoup money
before they spend all theirs
on Dixie beer.

“Warden crowd us into the hot box,
Ma’am ‘less we fight,
soak week-old French bread,
in boiled chicory water
shit in a drain in the floor
It behind the big steel fight room.
You can’t see it from here
but you always know it’s  there.

– Alice Weiss

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Doug Holder, 25 School St.; Somerville, MA 02143.
dougholder@post.harvard.edu