Brock Kniles ★ Original & Best

Tucked beneath his mattress was a composition notebook. Not the usual kind—no pornography sketches, no gang hierarchies, no escape plans scrawled in urine and Kool-Aid. Brock’s notebook contained poems. Sonnets, mostly. Petrarchan, Shakespearean, the occasional villanelle. He’d discovered Shakespeare in the prison library during his fifth year, smuggled out The Sonnets inside a laundry bag. For a man whose every waking hour was a negotiation for violence, the rigid architecture of fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, and a volta became his religion.

Brock had felt something he hadn’t felt since he was nineteen, standing over his father’s unconscious body with a tire iron: hope. And hope in Rookwood was a death sentence. brock kniles

Harlow lunged.

“Kniles,” Harlow said, flicking a shank made from a melted toothbrush. “Hand over the notebook. And the letter.” Tucked beneath his mattress was a composition notebook

Brock stood up. He was slower than he used to be, his left knee shot, his right hand missing half its pinky from a fight over a bag of chips. But he still had the mass of a man who’d spent two decades lifting cinder blocks in a cage. He reached under his mattress—not for the notebook, but for the plastic spork he’d sharpened against the concrete floor for three months. Sonnets, mostly

That was the problem.

His masterpiece was titled “Elegy for a Sparrow I Saw Crushed in the Sally Port.” It began: The steel door sighed, and then the little clock / Of bones gave way to pneumatic hiss. The prison’s creative writing teacher, a washed-up academic named Dr. Lerner doing community service, had submitted it to a small literary journal under a pseudonym. It got accepted.