Prison House of the Morning Star

by Nate Pritts

We occasionally get into trouble, my friends & I.

There was the time my friend in red was being chased
by invisible werewolves. We built an invisible barricade
to keep the invisible werewolves out but my friend in red
still claims to hear silent howls in the night. One other time,

my friends & I got ourselves trapped in individual-sized
prisons. We could no longer perform our secret handshake,
kept distant from each other by the unique quality of the bars.

The prisons themselves seemed to grow smaller as night
came on & then, with a blink, they were gone. We were ecstatic until,
in daylight, we realized the bars had formed snug to our bodies,

that we’d wear them always & unnoticeably.


Nate Pritts took his BS at SUNY Brockport, his MFA from Warren Wilson College and his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Currently, he teaches at the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, a residential high school for gifted students,& at Northwestern State University. His poems have recently appeared in Rattle, Cimarron Review, Solo, Dogwood and 5am.

Nate Pritts was nominated for Poets Under 30 by the storySouth editors.

poem from JUST US FRIENDS