Warden, I'm Ready

So, on the Texas Dept of Corrections website you can find the last words and last meal requests of folks on death row up until a few years ago. Fascinating. A lot of people don't have anything to say. Betty Lou Beets was one of them and I read pretty much her whole file. There isn't much of my poem that is based on her real situation, but it definitely, um, inspired me.


Warden, I'm Ready

My stomach warm from chicken-fried
steak and mashed potatoes: in or out of corrections
Izel, she must have cooked Americana better than most
good Texas boys and it makes me wonder how
any amigo could consider wrestling her
for a knife and thinking he'd walk out of the kitchen

crunching on a carrot. Takes me back to that bedroom,
back to Samuel in bed, his cigarette butt barely burning
in the ashtray on the bedside table, telling me prison
would keep the trigger locked, telling me, baby, nearly
all your threats come apart at doing right because who
wants to hold grandbabies through bars? Come on, baby,

lay back down. Huh? Let's get us some rest, honey.
Rest he got, eternal almighty, folded in the basement
freezer, icicles on his beard and eyebrows cold cooking
apologetic endearments I heard whenever opening that cell
door to make sure he was still there. Ten years later, almost
to the day I shot his ass for his firefighter's pension, why,

they got me jumpsuited and shackled: the spectators, what
they won't forgive this Gun Barrel City Black Widow
for, what scares them even from the other side of the observation room
window is the last meal, the last sip of chamomile warming
my cheeks, the smile they call solitary confinement
confusion. But hysteria is no longer an option. About

all the bold Texan pageantry they want me to wave like some
of their favorite madames of death row, it found its way out when
Samuel spit up his last bloody darling
and I went to wash it off in the bathroom.
They don't want remorse or pleas, but curses scalding
their ears, damnation from the damned, lifetime sentences

passed down to the good citizens from the derelict convict.
They want a chorus kickline before legs are gurney-strapped, some
spasmodic revolution from the skin and basilic veins where
the barbiturates will enter the bloodstream. They want a she-devil
ghost in black satin screaming bastard blues through attic
floorboards. They want 109' fever and white-flickering fire:

not the woman who slept well in the penitentiary: nor the part
of her that could kill a man for nothing: that could blacken
the execution room with the nonchalance of her last words:











.