Last Supper on Death Row by Doug Holder

Based on the artwork of the late Julie Green who used inmates' last suppers as an inspiration for her work.

So many requests for a futile death row meal--

One wanted eight glazed donuts

a sugar high

before the lethal gas.

Unabashed desire--

for some sweetness

before it all

went dark.

Some lives end

with two peanut butter cups

and a Doctor Pepper--

an another demands a white perch

that he caught

in a river in Louisiana 

remembering his father

slapping his back,

" That's the boy."

One even cried out, 

" I want my mother's

chicken dumplings!"

Comforting dollops

white embryonic sacks

full of meat

those seminal bites

of memory.

Yet others want a

clandestine shot of whiskey

straight,

no chaser

a little of the hair of

the dog that once bit him

and bit him

and bit him...

Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. He teaches writing at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. For over thirty years he ran poetry groups for psych patients at McLean Hospital, outside of Boston.