“DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR INMATES?”

 Ace Boggess

                        [question asked by Sarena Fox] 

Don’t play Spades with your cellies at two in the morning

by jaundiced glow of the suicide light.

Results in falling off your bunk more than you’d like.

If you’re passing a roll-up, don’t get caught.

Facing the Magistrate, don’t resist; say you did it,

tell a story or a joke, & ask him to be lenient.

Everyone has a different lesson

that must be learned by force, the hole, a broken bone.

Don’t eat the fish. Don’t snitch. Don’t cheat

at cards or chess. Don’t fall in love

with the cute C.O. who promises a secret spot,

unless you’re doing life, & then why not?

How about this? Do laugh when possible,

then pass that on, rattling off one-liners

like having drinks with friends at the bar.

Find happiness as often as you can &

hold it to your lips like chocolate,

savor it like a new pillow, burn it into your flesh

like a tattoo you know you shouldn’t get

but will because the blue enchants you &

the pain proves you’re breathing after all.

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, J Journal, Mid-American Review, Rhino, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia.