Voices of the Incarcerated - What Came Looking for Me
Kevin Reese grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He spent 14 years incarcerated inside of the criminal justice system. During that time he founded the BRIDGE, which is a grassroots group of directly impacted criminal justice experts whose mission is to abolish mass incarceration and find the answers to a true transformative criminal justice overhaul. Kevin is the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director at Until We Are All Free Movement and the Founder and CEO of Until We Are All Free Consulting Group.
In 2018, he was named an Intro Journals Project Winner by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and his poetry was published in the Hayden’s Ferry Review.
His award-winning poem, titled What Came Looking for Me, is featured below.
*****
It was a whale-sized anchor,
eroded and stuffed inside a clamshell
forced down my throat
sinking in my saliva.
It was my uncle
chained to a Buick Skylark
eating a broken bottle
that shattered like my father’s eyes
at the sight of his son sleeping in the womb,
barbwire attaching me to my mother.
It looked like my grandma’s iron pot
boiling river water and collard greens,
and my calloused feet pacing a prison cell
with a wishing well adjacent to a metal bunk
with an elephant’s tusk that sliced away follicles
of my skin every time I tossed and turned.
It was my son with an afro and a mustache,
standing in a field of snow with flip-flops
and no gloves, holding a basketball and a bus ticket.
It happened the day Minneapolis died
and a black rainbow galloped across the sky
and me and my cousins chased it.
*****
You can read more about the work Kevin Reese is doing with the organization he co-founded, Until We Are All Free, at their website. Until We Are All Free is a human rights organization led by formerly incarcerated criminal justice experts. The organization works to focus on building capital, resources and support to provide pathways to civic and economic liberation for individuals disenfranchised by mass incarceration.
