Palms
- Palms
All but mastering the art of deception, she operated under the alias of Annie Wilson in 1881, when she served her first larceny sentence at Eastern…If the true criminal nature would have surfaced, Powell might have entered Eastern as a “thief” and received a sentence longer than a year.
Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons
palms round your jewels palms your personals, pushing them in her pockets. palms paper bills and pennies, plopping them in her purse. palms wave away, past convictions’ glare. palms push two vice cops. they catch this thrice-time thief.
palms and judge’s ears collect Annie Wilson, the alias birthed in her throat. palms scribble this name. she is made, a fraud, a first-time offender.
palms brace for the pit. her body shoved into bowels. palms pitter patter this place, recalling the cells. palms pinch 189 days of stench, rotting flesh. can’t stay. palms fold in prayer, coddling a Sampson-like miracle. can’t stay. palms push against bars. bones and bruises proof her. can’t stray. palms, prepare a safe space, in case. [End Page 172]
palms are sure to push agony on her sides. palms, please, place precious beyond Powell’s regrets. palms and profanities to the guards. palms, protect the perfect from fists. palms pass a baby between steel and stays.
palms and ink, they cling to some things. they fist and prick a baby’s breast. they press. together they tattoo an innocent criminal. a baby, noted with a number, no name. the cells of her mother stamped upon her. [End Page 173]
Damaris B. Hill earned a PhD in English-Creative Writing and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas. The majority of her poetry is spiritually based and addresses issues of gender, race and identity. Eager to express the accomplishments of underrepresented women, she is writing a novel about juvenile delinquents.
Her selection of poems in this issue is based on the book Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 by Kali Nicole Gross, PhD., Associate Professor at University of Texas Austin. She was so genuinely moved by the triumphs and tragedies these women endured within the justice system that she has memorialized some of their experiences in her latest series of poems. Most of the poems attempt to create a first person testimony and are in formal verse. The use of formal poetic structure is symbolic of the women’s physical confinement within the Philadelphia penal system. It also acts as a critique of the economic and democratic limitations many African American women experienced in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is depicted as the beacon of liberty for Americans, but ironically it became the exact opposite for many of the African American women that migrated there. A majority of these poems blend the blues tradition with the conventional poetic forms.
