First thing in a new day, an inmate’s cheek
gauzed over a stitched hole. “I was too long
on the phone, so he smashed my head on the wall
and I bit his lip in self-defence. Then he bit
me — you can see it under the bandage.”
And a piece of cleverness: a new kind of shank
discovered when they turned out a cell,
fibreglass given a flaying or flensing edge
in the...
Richard Greene has published three books of poetry of which the most recent, Boxing the Compass (Signal Editions, 2009), won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2010. A new collection of his work, Dante’s House, including a long poem in terza rima, will be published in the coming year by Signal Editions.