Thread by @tsu_namee

#akleg

Best part of my day was when I was in prison. I've been co-teaching poetry every other week with my friend Erika, (side note, it's through a program called Infinite Writers, originated/organized by University of Alaska faculty).

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We warmed up our bodies and our voices and Erika led us in a cool lesson brainstorming metaphors for emotions together. Our discussion was clever and nasty and joyful and sharp. In our laughter, there were no guards.

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Anger was "quicksand" and boredom was "everything in reach" and fear was "an outgoing tide, slowly backing away from the shore.”

"I don't know the word for different kinds of waves," one woman had whispered to me as we wrote.

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Several weeks and two charges ago this very woman had gotten in a fight outside my store. There was so much yelling, and chairs were being thrown and knives were being waved. A crowd had gathered, and even I had frozen for a moment, unsure of what to do.

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Then the woman had thrown a knife inside my store and went to get it, and at this moment I followed her and offered her a glass of water and a place to sit down. Another woman had fallen to the ground, screaming “she took my knife!”

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and Ati was kneeling down, talking to her with the utmost respect. I will forever remember hearing Ati say “OK, where is your knife? Let’s get your knife so that you can feel safe” bc I thought that sounded like the best worst idea I would have never come up with.

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And like this we broke up the fight by slowly attending to each woman's terror.

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“You can make it up," I had whispered to the woman, who in this context was now holding a pen. "Poetry is just using words you know to describe the words you don't know.”

"Oh, this is poetry?" she replied, chuckling to herself, “I've never done this before.”

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And she wrote a short poem about Relief, and how it felt to sit in a forest with the rain drizzling around you, making everything clean, or waves of the ocean crashing in, and in, and in, the water renewing itself.

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I wish I could kneel down and fix the state budget with my bare hands. I wish I could offer the governor a glass of water. I wish I could sit beside him and list emotions until we landed on the one he wanted to write about.

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I don’t know what he feels or what any of the inmates feel or why a wave renewing itself only to crash offers any kind of relief, but it does.

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What good is poetry behind bars, what good are the words we make up, what good is giving a wild woman a knife

except that for a minute, or for 90 minutes or half a million minutes, we can feel safe.

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I wish our elected leaders could see that. That if people felt safe, so much more seems possible.

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