Come to Buffalo-- to this cold, through the chain link: -- -- -- approach (the fence) / / / --- --- --- caught. But I was here before and I felt its warmth when nature held me close at the cannery when I said come home to me. We never left: still mad as hell, s/hes, he-shes, zes. You put on the briefs and I memorialize the wounds. Remember what we did when they tried to break the stone. Cometo Buffalo-- hear me (hear the streets) for a long time. Slide your arms through the bars.
Jessica Lowell Mason is an instructor with the Bard Prison Initiative, an adjunct instructor at Niagara University and the University at Buffalo, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies and research assistant with the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo. She has two published poetry collections: Straight Jacket (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and A New Flora: Sapphic Poems from the Garden of Lesbos (Finishing Line Press, 2025), is the co-editor of Madwomen in Social Justice Literatures, Movements, and Art (Vernon Press, 2023), and is the co-founder of Madwomen in the Attic, a feminist mental health and madness literacy organization out of western New York.
