The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

by Junauda Petrus

Incarceration is a sustained, lifetime lynching, meant to discard your soul and make a shell of you in plain life. Make you into your monster self, the beast that comes out when you are forced to survive in the absence of love and safety. Never mind that most of us come broken and traumatized, we still are no longer worth our own humanity. We are a criminal. We need punishment and to be rehabilitated. We need shame and exclusion. We are not worthy of control of our own lives; we are hopeless and evil. We are not individuals or of a womb or a family. We are not absent from anywhere else; because we are here, we simply non-exist. The world is better without us. In this society we are taught our crimes are the summations of our lives and define the limits of our possibility. Our only potential is to harm and destroy. But I was a boy once. And to be honest, I can’t help but hold and carry him inside of me. Most of us in here is holding and carrying a scared and lonely little child in us. How could we not? I write this story for the little Afua in me that needs to know he is okay and worthy of life, even if my whole existence is a reminder that my breath will one day be taken away at a predetermined time by an executioner, whose