Member Poem

“a federal investigation found that deputies had used stun guns on prisoners already strapped into a ‘restraint chair.’ The family of one man who died after being forced into the restraint chair was awarded more than six million dollars… The family of another man killed in the restraint chair got $8.25 million… after the discovery of a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoner, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.”
 
—evidence against former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, pardoned by President Trump on August 25, 2017, as reported by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker
 
 
1.
 
the American rattlesnake is shedding its skin
revealing another layer
 
sticky with newness and sharp-edged with scales
the same, deathless serpent
 
brown-on-brown like a Western Diamondback
 
with each molt, the snake adds a segment to its rattle
sloughing skin into wads of dead keratin
 
dragging shed skins like history or taken scalps
 
 
2.
 
from 1993–2016, in Maricopa County, Arizona
Sheriff Joe Arpaio reigned
 
proclaimed his jail a “concentration camp”
in his custody, a hundred men died
 
on surveillance video, Scott Norberg slurs, dehydrated
barely conscious, strapped to a “restraint chair”
 
as fourteen police officers
shock, beat, and suffocate him to death
 
the good ol’ sheriff excused them all
and now the president has pardoned the sheriff
 
when lawyers started to investigate Scott’s death
the sheriff seized Scott’s body
 
the evidence of abuse—Scott’s crushed larynx
disappeared
 
 
3.
 
a larynx, also called a voice box
resembles a rattle segment
 
pyramidal and hollow
without them, you can’t make a sound
 
 
4.
 
picture them: larynxes
strung like rattles
 
pieces of victims
clattering after a car like tin cans
 
someone celebrating
a marriage of evil and convenience
 
mr. and mr. and mr. complicit:
 
Joe and Donny
Mitch and Ryan
 
maybe back to Adam
a circle-jerk of snakes
 
in business suits and fig leaves
paired with red power ties
 
red, like apples
and slithering on pinstripes
 
or slipping from breathless bodies
like leather restraints
 
 
5.
 
imagine—me, the serpent
 
surviving years between meals
you can’t starve me out
 
horses and cattle know:
you will have to trample me
 
gather
your voices like rattles

This poem was first published in I am not a silent poet.