Palms Up
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It's a Tuesday, so I pray, just me again, striking the keys. If I had only an iron pipe, I'd rap it on a metal fence as I ran. I'm grown now; I wear shoes instead of sneakers. No father to beat the soles of my feet with a broom, so I stay in bed late. I am playing the clarinet of my feelings, tapping the vibraphone of my heart. Buck Clayton is weeping his trumpet over the flapjacks of my morning, Lester Young circling my espresso. I take it all, palms up to the ceiling, which is the closest I'll get to the sky, because of today's fear of going outside, and I push it, push it, back to you, Maker. [End Page 149]
Eddie Bartók-Baratta is the founder of Fridays Are for Prisoners, a group that uses fasting, voluntary isolation, and other creative means to raise awareness that there are over two million people in prison in the United States.
