Charles Harper Webb

Nutraloaf

“. . . sometimes called prison loaf, is a food served in United States prisons
to inmates who have demonstrated significant behavioral issues.”
—Wikipedia

It’s served on paper: no tray, no fork, no knife.
Jailhouse chefs, plotting escape to France,
add to raw carrots, spinach, and lima beans,

their dreams of lamb sautéed with rosemary
and secret tunnels out. The warden tosses in
potato flakes, cubed whole-wheat bread,

plus Bible verses, license plates, the Valley
Elementary jungle gym where he stared
at Jenny Highsmith’s flowered underwear.

The guards add vegetable oil, no-dairy cheese,
and air from their inflated salaries, along
with claustrophobia, lethal sperm,

and shrimp scampi a la lemme-out-of-here.
Cell-blocks add to the strength of steel
and hardness of concrete, powdered milk,

tomato paste, rape jelly, and Eggs
Bend-yer-dick, while inmates chip in
snakes and snails and puppy-dog wails,

sugar and spice and everything noose,
riots, shankings, tear-drop tattoos,
poison-pen pals, and memories (first trout,

and the worm that caught it; dancing
on St. Patrick’s Day before everyone got
smashed, then every thing), not to mention

life-long subscriptions to Better Luck Next Time,
screams that seem imported from a zoo,
four-and-twenty jailbirds baked in three-

and-twenty body bags, and the sun rowing
up and going down while you do time
and time, day after deadened day, does you.

 

Lifeline    

Why did Reyes Sanday write—in deep blue
ink inside a drawer in this fleabag hotel
I’m stuck in for the night—his El Salvador
address, and “It’s 1970. Help! I’m alive!”? 

One feeble fan can’t motor me out of this heat.
I dream I’m fishing off Maui, sweat stinging
my eyes, when a marlin grabs my feather jig.
The captain straps me in the fighting chair.

My wife shrieks, “It’s a whale!” I jam
my rod into its holder as the boat-long fish
takes off. It’s like trying to stop a destroyer.
With a splintering crash, my chair rips out

of the deck and hurtles overboard. Dragged
deep into the shivering blue, I just
have time to think, "Oh shit," fumbling
to free the straps that trap me in the chair

while, like Ahab snagged on Moby Dick,
I’m towed toward the realm of lantern fish
and giant squid. No time to equalize the pressure
in my ears, or conserve air. Barely time,

in the accelerating dark, to wriggle off my harness,
and kick toward what I pray is up. I burst
through the sea-surface, hands grasping for air
which I use to hail the captain on his shattered

deck beside my wailing wife. I call to them
the way Sanday calls from his drawer,
and these black letters call to you, reader, even
from oblivion’s darkest depths: “Help! I'm alive!”

 

Charles Harper Webb's new collection of poems, Old Gnu, won the Editor’s Choice Award from Longleaf Press, and will be out in 2026. The Elephant of Surprise, a collection of prose poems, will be out from Moon Tide Press in the same year.