Bricks Witness
….
Bricks witness time served
the leaving and the longing
the you and the me.
Bricks witness the ugly
riot-grin between
I love you / I hate you.
Bricks witness the prison
in all its glory, the prison
of two islands landlocked.
…..
This poem is from the chapbook Prisonegg by Jonathan Pessant (Finishing Line Press) and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/prisonegg-by-jonathan-pessant/
Remembering is a prison. The poems in Prisonegg are a timeline, from contract signing to basic training, from military prison guard to the complexity prison of marriage, then divorce. They are memories of the good, the bad, and the nearly forgotten. While Fort Leavenworth and the United States Disciplinary Barracks is the central setting for the narrative, it lives beyond fact and fiction, where past can be a prison but also eggs us into being ourselves.
Jonathan Pessant is a Maine poet and Army veteran. He holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. His literary lineage includes Beat poetry and early cyberpunk fiction.
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