Jay Pabarue
Nothing is like being alone when you shouldn’t be alone (Taylor Johnson)
dear P,
trouble is i could make a temple out of any closed door and clicked lock. those nastysoft hours with V in their room began with us sitting down, a yellowed zz plant brightening the space between us, and slowly we said all the right names for what we wanted to do to each other, what we wanted done to us, tenderly ongoingly. then there were our hands and tongues, our asses and limned openings, our mouths gone slack, doing them. despite describing the strip-mined feeling behind your eyes, since you mentioned your kid sharing that marionberry pie with you in your letter, it seemed you were writing from outside a place of deepest self-loathing. if only barely. writing to define a world where you hurt less. and i was glad for it. not that i’m embarrassed to discover you in your entire shame—do you want me to? if you did, i wouldn’t look away. would stay. would press something to you, a warm washcloth, myself. now i am writing to walk along sentences like these which i think might take me back into memory’s wilderness. the periphery becomes a streamed blur of trail markers, bluegreenyellowyellowred. i think i’m calling memory a wilderness b/c as i draw closer my hair prickles. and i’m frightened. of the twelve to fifteen starved boys in here who look just like me, half with burst eye clots. (still only brave enough for little details.) in some ways my health was up by the time i was 18 and on that June afternoon i was cuffed and splayed, left cheek pressed into the sun-warmed police van door, and hours later set free for the wrong reasons but yes i should have been free. and i was only put into the car cage, not jail. nothing is like jail, Taylor Johnson writes, b/c nothing is like a wall you can’t scale. arms cuffed behind your back cops twisting you around yourself declaring you restrained till anyone can harm you, and the only people you can hope to intervene are, like you, detainable. it’s no secret someone’s got the job of watching a wall of boxed screens showing live feeds of people behind closed doors and clicked locks, in love, in danger, in study, in pain. 100,000 at any time in this city. and now Eric Adams wants to bring solitary back to Rikers. no. vowed he would. behind a closed door and clicked lock, the body gone, in prayer.