April is Poetry Month

Powerful poem by North Carolina's Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti, "The City Jail," about Pittsburgh and a schoolboy and Catholicism, and faith, and fear, feelings of inadequacy and guilt, and working in a prison, and being trapped within -- well, read it for yourself in the Dead Mule. It begins below.~~GH

The City Jail spiked out of Fifth Avenue
in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh.
When we drove by it, my father would pause
and signify in its direction,
never uttering a word. Riding shotgun,
my mother on cue blurted she'd glimpsed
our imaginary condemned prisoner
in the jail's uppermost barred window.
[Click to finish reading]