Prison slang sits in the title of Art Gomez's "In Stir," yet nobody in the poem is behind bars. A man squirms at the edge of a Farmer's Market, and the poem watches him until he disappears into a bag. The title still fits. "Stir" also suggests agitation and restless motion, and this man is trapped in both senses. Judging by the details, his cell is his own body and mind, and the sidewalk is the only yard he gets.
The central idea is that confinement doesn't need walls, and that a crowd can ignore a person as completely as a locked door can. The setting does a lot of this work. A farmer's market suggests fresh food, health and neighbourly ease, and the man is pushed to its "fringe," where he "claims his cranny," as if a crack in the wall were all the property he could own. The alliteration of "claims" and "cranny" is brisk and almost comic, but the humour sours quickly. The poem is also odd in what it leaves out. There is no "I," no passer-by who reacts, and no sympathy or disgust. The speaker reports like a camera, so the reader inherits the position of the shoppers who look and keep walking.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and the free verse suits a body that won't keep time. Its five stanzas vary in length, and the line breaks often act out the action. In "his words drool / from the corners of / his downturned mouth," the lines fall away short and steep, the way spit runs down a chin. The language of the second stanza is physical and unpleasant: "spittle," "viscous," "thick as lubricant." Speech has become a bodily fluid. His "quarrels" turn into something that lands on the pavement and his shirt, which suggests nobody is listening to them anyway.
The third stanza holds the poem's most striking image. He leans so far forward that he "defies gravity, / hovering face-down as if feet / are locked in concrete." The picture is almost heroic and also painful, a man held at an impossible angle by something invisible. Then the verbs change: "Jerking violently, he straightens / then slides down the side of the building." Gravity wins after all. Even the building seems to join in, since it "guards his back," a protective verb that sits oddly beside the title. He ends in "quasi-lotus," a good example of Gomez choosing a word carefully. The lotus position belongs to calm meditation, and "quasi" admits the pose is only a rough imitation. The calm is borrowed and does not belong to him.
Then comes the poem's one spoken word, set apart in its own stanza: "Tourniquet." A tourniquet stops bleeding, but the poem never says what is bleeding or why he says it. The poem doesn't explain, and I think that restraint is deliberate. The word could point to injury, to addiction, or to something he is trying to hold shut inside himself. The next stanza adds that "Just that one word escapes," and "escapes" quietly answers the title. After all that struggle, the only thing that gets out is a single word nobody can use.
The ending is chilling. He pulls "a grimy bag / with a smiley face / over his head." This echoes the first stanza, where his "wild" smile was "a grimace." The two faces mirror each other, one involuntary and distorted, the other printed and cheerful. The bag works as a mask that gives the public the smile it would prefer to see, and it also lets him vanish from view. The poem stops there, with no rescue and no comment.
What makes "In Stir" significant is how plainly it works. It pairs a harsh vocabulary with a cheerful setting and trusts the reader to feel the gap. By refusing to explain the man, it also shows how little the people around him have asked.