“Winners” Poem and “While You Wait” Drawing

I am a mother, daughter, survivor, and peacemaker. I am Mexican, Indigenous, and Muslim. As a social worker in legal defense, I work with people who are incarcerated and who face punishment that ranges from daily surveillance on the street to state-sanctioned death. My identities often mirror the identities of the people I serve in experiences, faith, and pain, but I have not suffered the indignity and torture of incarceration. The lives of the incarcerated people I serve and my own life are indefinitely intertwined; my freedoms are linked to the oppression of others. Through my work, I attempt to lay bare what I see in carceral systems, communicate suffering that will lead to action, and tell the silenced truths of people that incarceration tries to forget. “The Winner” is a remembrance and celebration of incarcerated people I’ve left behind physically, and who remain my most valuable teachers about faith, liberation, the global south, Africa, and Palestine. “The Winner” is a road map for my movement through grief and a way to imagine a path forward in organizing alongside incarcerated people and with people directly impacted by carceral systems; beyond physical separation or death. “While You Wait” is a drawing of the visiting room of a Special Housing Unit (SHU) at a Federal jail in Brooklyn, where a visitor can bring nothing but paper and pen. Jails, prisons, and incarceration isolate to destroy, and with that knowledge in mind, I chose to create.