Poetry by Terrell Carter

Right now I’m sitting in a penitentiary yard, the sun slowly retreating west giving me one last kiss goodbye. I got my ear buds in listening to some 80’s and 90’s old school Hip Hop, that golden era, the best era ever, and at the same time I’m yearning for my freedom. You see, there is no wall here so I long for something that’s right in my face, but just out of reach, separated by a razor wire fence, almost like that fly pair of shoes you want sitting in a display case, but you’re too broke to buy. 

But is that what freedom is? Is it just unconfined space? For me, freedom has become much more than moving beyond barriers that confine us to space. For me, freedom is being able to think , to listen, to be critical without fear, to speak truth to lies. Freedom is the mind breaking free of limitations, both those imposed by outside forces and those imposed by the self. Freedom is poetry, its jazz, its freestyle rap, its being authentically you, its loving unconditionally, its standing up to tyranny even when death is sure to follow. 

Interestingly enough, people confined wish for freedom in spite of the fact in a lot of cases we’re more free than those of us walking around unconfined. Freedom is a word we write about, argue about, even fight to the death about, but it’s still only a word. People will rob each other of freedom in an effort to obtain their own sense of what freedom is. It’s a circular conception of what we mistakingly believe we have a right to just because we’re alive. The problem begins when we attempt to define freedom other men must lose theirs when that definition is imposed upon them. So yeah, walls and fences do confine, but do they really take away our freedom? 

So as the warmth of the sun’s kisses fades from my skin and I continue to stare through the razor wire, I offer a silent prayer to God, because even with everything that I just wrote, it sure do look good on the other side of that fence.

By Terrell Carter

She stood on the strip alone, neon signs flashing, glowing in the dark, beckoning,

promising fantasies on sale for just 10.00$.

Artificial lights of corner street lamps, urban spotlights, highlight her pace as she strolls, as she struts.

The night, her camouflage she wears to hide who she’s become.

Back and forth on a ghetto catwalk of, “I gotta do what I gotta do!” 

But it don’t make her feel no better.

Runs in her stockings like tracks leading to the promised land criss cross chocolate thighs,

lipstick that bleeds stain her teeth, but she still finds the courage to smile, although she left

happiness behind with bouncing pigtails in a hopscotch square long time ago.

Black girl lost in a perception not her own, where she’s been reduced to body parts

and how well she can cook a steak.

Everything she wants to be a vision of those who confine her.

Bitch embodied where motherhood becomes a prison

and dreams shriveled dry become saturated with paper rain–no shame.

But is it really her choice? If we didn’t want to see it, would she still want to be it?

Her voice a silent shout that no one hears as it echoes in a concrete valley of, “don’t nobody want yo ugly ass but me!” And she believed it. 

She’s a convict sentenced to a lifetime of who we think she should be

with her only means to freedom locked in a cage wrapped in the razor wire of her doubt, patrolled by her insecurities and guarded by the only person in the world with the key–HERSELF.