Danny Shot
The Newark Question
A hall for people
not yet sent away,
our NJ neighbors.
The doors are locked,
windows watched,
only guards decide
when a husband may touch his wife.
At Delaney Hall
the breakfast may come at five,
or eight,
or whenever the timetable
remembers the human body.
The food arrives spoiled.
The water tastes wrong.
The showers burn.
Medicine does not always come
when the illness does.
Outside, officials ask to inspect.
Inside, the answer is No.
Not the medical rooms.
Not the sleeping rooms.
Not the places where a person
must remove their clothes
to become clean.
A curious arrangement:
The government has authority
to take a person from his home,
his workplace, an airport, a street,
but not enough authority
to look inside the building
where it has put him.
There is a business here.
Someone owns the walls.
Someone signed the contract.
Someone counts the beds.
Someone calculates how cheaply
a human being can be kept locked up.
The people waiting
have names.
A mother.
A mechanic.
A cook.
A delivery driver.
A man who pays taxes.
A woman carrying a child.
A father whose little girl
does not understand
why the guard stands between them.
Real people
with God given names:
Jean Brutus,
Jose Chajon-Raxon
Edwin Lopez-Cornejo,
inexplicably dead
at Delaney Hall (for profit)
ICE Detention Facility
Newark, NJ.
The government calls this
a detention facility.
The lawyer calls it
a case.
The guard calls it
a procedure.
The child calls it:
Daddy, don't go.
So, the detainees stop eating.
Not because suffering is noble.
They stop eating because sometimes
the only thing a person still owns
is the ability to say no.
Outside the gates, citizens gather.
Inside the gates people wait,
and somewhere above them
a document is stamped:
PENDING.
They are told to be patient.
Ask the person
who is locked inside
how long a minute is.
Ask the man staring
through the glass
at industrial Newark
while the razor wire fencing
stares back.
Then ask ICE,
if dignity requires permission,
who gave you yours?
Danny Shot’s new collection of poems, The Jersey Slide was published in the fall of 2025 by CavanKerry Press. His prose, collected in Night Bird Flying was published in February 2025 by Roadside Press. WORKS was published in 2018 also by CavanKerry Press. Danny is a New Generation Beat Poet Laureate (2024-Lifetime), and Poet in Residence of the Hoboken Historical Museum. Danny Shot was the longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot arts and literary magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ. More information can be found on his website: dannyshot.com