All the Hollow Parts of Us
by Corey Baron
Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York, 2023
When I am naked
of all my gold,
I squeeze myself
through metal detectors
until I am boxed in tight
as the bible I locked
in a box outside
the building, tight
as the song in the chest
of a blackbird, it’s wings
beating into a rusted
cage the color of its beak.
Here, I am as alone
as I have ever been.
On the bus, I watched
a woman change
her child with one eye
shut, her face bruised
and blue as the bow
nestled in her baby’s hair.
She was trembling
and troubled, touched
by the wrong man.
The lit names
of avenues scrawled
across her face like
the names carved into
the walls of a cell.
But in the hollow halls
the voice becomes
an instrument. A woman
singing to God, begging
to be touched. The song
sailing down the neck
of a cell block, where cages
line the walls like the snaggled
teeth of the woman striking
her song into my skin,
her face lead-colored
and striped by lashes
of light that don’t bite
through the bars. Mostly,
we all just want to be touched
by something. Consider
Jacob, wrestling with God
until sunlight spilled
into the open mouth
of a river. Consider the young
blackbird, too frail
to fly, writhing at the edge
of a muddy creek. Its neck
aimed into a smoke-
stained sky like a pistol
loaded with song. I’ve
learned that light
has a way of touching
everything. But I am all
shadow as the guards
gird my steps and I walk
the line, making portraits
of each face in this brutal
gallery: some scared,
some scarred, one scraping
a song out of her sideways
mouth, her hands closed
around the bars, caressing
them the way she
might caress the spine
of a bible, or the hand
of a man she once loved.
Her neck now lifted
like the baby
blackbird’s and searching
the ceiling of her cell
for the kind of God
whose touch can leave you
limping. And my mind wraps
around the image of her face
like a frame, my heart
beating hard as the rusted
wing of a captive bird, my eyes
turned down so low, I can
almost see inside myself.