by Jack B. Bedell
There’s got to be a moment
when the inmate clown
wants the bull to stomp him out,
that long second when the dust
kicked up from the bull’s charge
rises toward heaven
and people in the stands
hold all the air in their lungs,
that hard pause when it’s not a life
passing through the eye
of your mind’s needle, but the sweet
nothing of a day’s real end.
Tomorrow holds more work in the field,
more slop on metal trays for supper,
more time in lockdown playing chess
through the bars of your cell, or
reading by whatever light makes it through
the chain link fence outside your cage.
And who wouldn’t think about that hard ground
pressing into their spine, how
one quick punch from the bull’s forelegs
would press them straight into deep, deep
earth, no doctor needed, no crying to do, no
way to hold a spade come morning?
Editor’s Note: This poem was inspired by the photograph Angola Prison Rodeo, 2013 by Chandra McCormick, on display through May 18, 2019 at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Louisiana. The photograph appears in the traveling exhibition Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex: Photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. The Angola Prison Rodeo is the longest running prison rodeo in the U.S.
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His latest collections are Elliptic (Yellow Flag Press, 2016), Revenant (Blue Horse Press, 2016), and No Brother, This Storm (Mercer University Press, fall 2018). He is currently serving as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.