The day after Thanksgiving,
November 28th, 2014, I went to Jackson, Michigan.
There are three prisons there
and I arrived at the right one at the right time, 9:42 am,
to get a good spot in the visitors’ line.
There were already people outside
the main entrance. A corrections officer
poked his head out the door, told us Come back
at 9:45, so we hugged the exterior walls
and became invisible.
Three minutes later he was ready.
We went inside.
I wrote my name on a list
and before the officer took my ID
and searched my body I waited
in the waiting room.
In the waiting room there were no women
with awful hanging breasts
or even National Geographic images of them
but there was a tickertape newsfeed
on the flat-screen TV
mounted above the lockers visitors use
because we can’t bring anything inside.
The man on the screen warned me to watch
for a missing girl with blonde hair,
she’s seven, or maybe twelve.
There were lots of other people in the waiting room:
there were grown-up people and babies
(they had normal heads)
and in-between people too.
Some of them watched the man
on TV and some of them sat
in the blue plastic bucket seats bolted
to the ground and some of them stood
at the lockers fumbling with coins and keys
to lock late-fall-Michigan belongings inside –
parkas and wallets, knitted hats and mittens.
I heard, Where’s daddy?
A girl pressed her face to the double-plated glass
separating our waiting room from the security room
(there’s another room after that,
and then another where the prisoners wait).
She had two dark curly pigtails and a white party dress
with big blue flowers on it, hydrangeas, maybe?
(she’d dressed up for the occasion).

I heard my dad yell
BE CAREFUL! and suddenly we were all
everyone in the waiting room
(even the officer and the man on TV)
we were all on our dad’s laps licking ice cream
and the ones without dads were on their dad’s laps licking ice cream
we were on the beach pulling kites
in the park playing tag
on the floor climbing bellies (mountains),
they’re reading us books,
the dads, there’s a sea of them, of books,
a sea of books, and a sea of dads.

The picture on the screen was one of us
(or it could be)
it was certainly not a them:
He wore a Tigers baseball cap,
his eyes far from his nose,
his ears peeked out from under his hat,
he was not smiling,
and instead of his shirt we saw text
line the bottom of the screen:
#1 Suspect, and I thought,
Maybe I’ll buy a baby,
the kind from Honduras or Togo,
or Thailand, where I’ll send a monthly check
in exchange for a pencil-printed letter
on embellished stationary
and a water-stained photo
of a six-year old standing on a dirt mound
with stringy hair, a round middle,
and a toothless smile.
Maybe I’ll find my baby
when they post a picture of it on TV
like the man in the Tigers cap.

There’s a sea of dads 100 feet, a strip search
and a pat-down away. When the officer summoned me
to check in and called me Sugar, I did not wince.
I couldn’t be angry.
That’s my name, isn’t it?

Leigh Sugar

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