How to Take a Life
Keep a son from his mother until her last breath.
When she goes, all she’ll know of him is desert
heat, folded letters, a phantom of his sixteen-year-old self outside
her nursing home window, unable to come inside. Venite,
Chepito, venite. If he could, he’d leave the gang, leave the gun,
come home. Venite. If he could, he’d disappear the war,
his father’s strike, his father’s stroke. If he could, he’d
pick a different place, a different time, free his hands
of any crime, of any charge. When he goes, all he’ll know
of her is the faint fatigue of her voice, her full name tattooed
beneath his throat. When he goes, all he’ll know of life is
every inch of a cell, the way the decades flew by, and how he was made
to rot, alone.
Copyright © 2026 by Janel Pineda. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 2, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem in the prison parking lot after visiting my tío Chepe for the first time since my grandma—his mother—had passed away. I was grieving her and the fact that she did not get to see her son free before she died. Drawing on the teachings of abolition and the spirit of Michel de Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals,’ this poem elucidates the ways [in which] the prison system itself commits the crimes it alleges to protect society from. As a system-impacted person, I also wanted to demonstrate the ways that carceral violence extends to the families and loved ones of incarcerated folks.”
—Janel Pineda
Janel Pineda
