Brock Kniles < Top 100 PREMIUM >

Dunleavy, crying, took the letter. He tucked it into his waistband as the guards’ whistles shrieked down the corridor.

“I’m not a poet because I’m soft,” Brock said, his voice a low gravel. “I’m a poet because I learned that the most dangerous thing in the world is a man with nothing to lose—except a single, stupid, beautiful sentence.” brock kniles

Brock didn’t move. His rust-colored eyes flicked to Dunleavy. The kid was trembling. Brock remembered being that young, that scared, that certain that violence was a language you could learn without losing your own voice. Dunleavy, crying, took the letter

Harlow lunged.

Word spread. By noon, the Aryan Brotherhood had a new rumor: Kniles was a snitch, using poetry as coded letters to the DA. By evening, the Kings had their own theory: he was writing a tell-all about prison corruption. The truth—that a violent lifer wrote sonnets about sparrows—was too strange to survive. “I’m a poet because I learned that the