For two years, I provided remote poetry lessons for fellow English teacher Daniel Lithgow to deliver to his students at Court Alternative Program of Education (CAPE) school, part of the Pima County’s Juvenile Justice System, located in the residential unit at the facility on Ajo Way in Tucson. As a teaching artist with UA Poetry Center’s Writing the Community collaboration with CAPE, I designed packets with activities of poetry writing prompts, as well as provided ongoing feedback for the students on their writing. Then, I would assemble poems written by each student and submit them to the Poetry Center’s annual grades 6-12 anthology for publication.

Teaching remotely was a continuation of pandemic protocols but finally, this Fall semester 2024, the Pima County Juvenile Justice system approved Writing the Community teaching artists to return in person to work with the students.

I was nervous and excited about finally getting to meet my incarcerated students face-to-face.

My first time stepping through the doors at the facility, I had to pass a number of security checkpoints. Thick, dark glass separated me and the people operating the doors. Latches clanked, buzzers sounded. My footsteps echoed in the long, dimly-lit hallways whose predominating colors were an institutional gray-green, though it was clear that some enthusiastic attempts had been made to cover the blank walls with student expressions such as colorful handprints and signatures, Mesoamerican warriors, and quotes from social justice heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Still, no colorful paint could hide the fact that it was a daunting environment to enter into and spend time in.

I tried to imagine what it was like for my students to be here 24-7 for as many days, weeks, months or years their cases required of them.

It seemed, well, joyless.

Thus, I was determined to convey a capacity for joy that I hoped would be infectious, engaging, and welcoming to the youth.

Upon arrival, I tried to memorize student names as quickly as I could by glancing at the backs of their chairs where their names were printed in bold black paint.

I offered each student a fist bump and introduced myself with, “Hi, I'm Taylor. What's your name?”  Then, I began with a special icebreaker I’d drawn from an event called Sparkle Souls that my friend Amelia Whalen created several years ago. She and a couple of friends had tried to go to an open mic night and found it inexplicably cancelled, so they went back to their own backyard patio and “Sparkle Souls” was born.

The Sparkle Souls group had been meeting for several years before I joined, and I was immediately delighted by the communal, friendly, laughing-filled atmosphere with humans who felt like they could become my friends.

We began each Sparkle Souls gathering with something that Amelia called a “provoracle”, which is a portmanteau word combining “proverb” and “oracle.” The way the activity works is this: everyone at the gathering takes turns completing a sentence by adding a single word in a round, building a statement so funny, silly, smart, or mystical until someone decides on their turn that the provoracle is complete. They end the sentence by saying “yes, yes, yes, yes,” while tapping the tips of their fingers on both hands together in front of their face like a sage on a mountaintop contemplating truth. Finally, everyone else in the gathering joins in to echo and tap “yes, yes, yes, yes,” in turn, signaling their agreement that the provoracle has been created and it is good.  It’s all quite goofy and fun.

My CAPE students loved doing provoracles. While many groaned theatrically at the idea of ending it with the silly sage finger-tapping, inevitably someone would end the provoracle just that way and we’d all join in, with lots of grins and giggles.

My collaborative classroom teacher did his best to scribe each word the students contributed during our provoracles so that if anyone got confused and needed to remember where we were in the sentence, he could read it back to them.

In this way, we stumbled our way around the room multiple times, sometimes coaching one another on how best to fill in the next word until we’d arrived at a (mostly) complete sentence that was that day’s sum total of our collective wisdom and silliness, as it were.

Regardless of what sentence we ended up creating, and despite many provoracles bending the rules of conventional grammar (one student did, in fact, exclaim in the midst of one of these creation processes, “We need Grammarly, Miss!”), the provoracle game never failed to elicit hilarity, a sense of community, and yes, joy, among these writers.

In closing, I want to share the CAPE provoracles:

The large dog ran from you, house, him, and he got very cow.

The moment is delightful and surprising; farts to your skin and the dogs ran through my backyard and hop the fence; dogs also have rabies and lice but they are special.

Rabbits are weird, fast, and scary; they look like white gray and poops dots; they poop pellets atrocious smell when they fart and sleep inside.

Extracurricular activities fight, bro and always indubitably never giving up and hopelessness amount of toenails, fingernails, consecutive life sentences.

I walked through the night, the moon shines brightly through the shadows and gets me hype.

The hate you give reflects on everybody so it's not okay to speak to Mom harshly.

And, to end with my personal favorite:

If not for you then for me I can give.

And that’s what joy is, after all—a gift we give ourselves, when we decide that laughter is a far better alternative to all the ways we are trapped or stuck inside whatever we cannot control.  

That, in the end, is all anyone can really give: the best of ourselves, to ourselves, under whatever circumstances.  

I think that’s what the CAPE students discovered about writing poetry, too. They let themselves give the gift of writing to themselves, each and every morning of my visit, when they pressed pen to paper, and told their own truths.  

It just took a little breaking of the ice: goofy words, giggles, and some finger wiggles, and they were free to play. Clanking doors and buzzing intercoms besides.

Taylor Johnson was born in Washington, DC, raised in Western Maryland, but now considers herself of the Sonoran Desert, having lived in Tucson for the past 23 years. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from the University of Arizona in 2007. 2025 is her third delightful year serving as a teaching artist for Writing the Community.