Poetry by John Brantingham

Prison is a place that can never go
dark, so great flood lights shine on its brick walls.
Light glimmers off its razor wire coils.
Light pins down men in the yard in the snow.
Light blots out the stars. Light, in the dorms
they tell me, filters from outside. The students say
they lie awake for hours. They’re tired the next day.
One tells me he dreams of darkened rooms.
The night after the aurora borealis,
they ask me what it was like to stand
in a broad dark field and watch the sky dance.
I tell them about the greens and the blues.
One says when he gets out, he’s going north. He plans
to watch them with the wife he still hasn’t met.

John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.

Photo by Tim Photoguy on Unsplash