Poems by Ismael “Izzy” García Santillanes
love cannot fill the caesuras creased on my skin
nor make me forget the knife used to parse poetry
from your breath or how i spent 10464 days
testifying to the rattling metal gate darkness to each
of the small bricks in a cell too small for prayers so
i learned poetry to abbreviate my shame to hide in
figures of speech i metaphored through vents and
personified above the prison yard above the flood
lights’ yellow tint transcended enjambed and flinted
wings rolling and laughing at icarus for having done
this when the sun would edit his lines and not the
moon’s woo but always the chremamorphistic brick
beating its dust inside my chest harder and faster
until i grasped for breath and awoke still there still
searching for a line to hide my name
time and the lemon
time will tell the lemon in a wooden bowl when to rot
the imperative to yield its breath to knife its own stomach
time will tell me when to smell the decay
to lift it roll it over to see the black and green wound
prisoner called i-80
Sep 08, 2012 · CARSON CITY – A deputy coroner in Carson City said foul play is not suspected in the death of highway sniper Christopher Merritt, whose body was found in his prison cell Aug. 23 [Las Vegas Journal Review]
no one knew you would hang yourself no one cared but a few knew determination petechiae
disheveled red beard tufts of brown hair quaking muscles like the pigs you slaughtered one night
all two hundred of them .22 round to the brain exploding like the mailboxes you homemade
bombed on your unplanned road trip from nebraska to nevada to harm yourself then there was
the store clerk you chained to the gas station’s toilet her eyes if opened askance we talked about
how people under control of a madman tightly close their eyes at his coming but you only
needed gas and food a couple of orange crush how you didn’t want the chain you found lying at
the station to cut off circulation little considerations you could not at the end afford as you put to
task what a native brother had taught you about knots as you architected electric cord to tighten
as it pulled your feet up and behind to keep from touching the cell’s floor as your head engorged
with the last of life as you swung and every empty feeling filled with freedom
i get tired of being the victim in my dreams but every night i
wake up startled by things not real except my sense of hell screaming without making a sound
begging without pitch from trachea a windpipe without even the slightest dissonance wordless as
the cool sheets i fling to one side as if my whole body has to breathe because apnea is what
happens when i dream of hell because breathing in hell is useless you won’t die without
breathing nobody in hell dies they just keep trying to remember a word no mouth can whisper
because tongues are the first the devils take and it takes a while to realize the lungs no longer
push and pull those longed-for molecules of friction of vibration of viscous vowels or the teeth of
consonants someone might have throated as contraband i wake up gasping to suck in what life
sounds like and my wife asks were you dreaming and all i say is
