“George J Stinney Jr” by Corey Moore
Even in photographs our eyes danced
across platforms blowing kisses to souls.
Pupil windows–speaking to writer soulmates.
Folks can’t help but wonder,
“What were they thinking, before the snap?”
In no type of cheese mode
we take on burdens through a pose.
You see a cape, pain, and joy behind
our romantic eyes, in our safest recesses.
We’re uniquely interesting, so people love
to study us.
We found relief in meeting each other…
One of a kind.
Our audience only hopes to unburden
our shoulders, space, where we
have room for one more head.
One journalist to another,
“Let’s get out of here, go someplace
we are physically incapable of capturing
scenic views, frozen in time with a polaroid.”
We chill, mentally stroll, by postcards
that come alive in our abstract minds —
another kind of photography.
We love the tangibility of in our
imagination that only being
Beyond Bars can create.
On dreary days, when gloom is highfalutin
over the penal industrial complex,
we work hard to find hidden meaning
in the photographs.
Depressing haters, we being sublime,
frame nicely for paparazzi, present well, pretty, handsome, bossy.
We drip even in Black and white
photos and don’t get laid off
or ask for days off,
because we’re timeless.
People are always rooting for us.
So what–we get around, we have to.
You open to us,
we leave you open.
You read our stories —
you read our story.
Meeting us while doing our time,
unjustified, justified, over personified.
Oftentimes, we only have one pitch,
expected to be hotter, competing
with the resourced free-people have.
We have to make incarcerated life
look good, so you will pick us up–a
sparkling tabletop parked on page 22,
“Who is that?”
“What are they talking about?”
“Do I want to invest in them?”
Ready to blowup our phones,
soon as we touch down. Like Oscar’s pupils,
we leave a bemused audience wondering
“how did they get that cold, slap?”
Gleaning from a photograph of a Prison Journalist.
Befuddling…
