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Admission Process
suffragette prisoners, 3rd division, Holloway Gaol, 1912
What can I do, but undress
with the others? Naked I wait
for a chemise. The officer
bundles my clothes, thrusts them
on a shelf. I, who was so quick
to speak, stand barefoot,
arms raised, while she prods,
picks through my hair. Do I
keep my hand from slapping?
The doctor who pretends to examine me
slides his stethoscope across my chemise.
The ear pieces dangle between us.
“Are you all right?”
He speaks to my chest.
What is all right? My heartbeats, breaths
miraculously haven’t reached him. He doesn’t ask
to check my tongue, my throat.
The wardress pushes me on and I miss answering.
A dozen more women wait in the queue.
The first one he looks at will change him to stone.
My cell walls are greased with dankness.
Stench lies in my bed. Above me,
a pane of rippled glass, snatched light.
Because I can read, do sums, sign my name,
I’m granted a bible, a hymnal, a tract
wherein a Mrs. Stacpoole dispenses advice:
take daily baths
sleep with windows open
avoid bad smells
Louisa Howerow’s most recent poetry appeared in FreeFall, The Nashwaak Review and Room. This poem is part of a manuscript that gives voice to the rank and file members of the British suffragette movement. Two of the poems in this collection appeared in The New Quarterly, guest edited by Diane Schoemperlen. Another poem in a slightly altered version was published in Room.
Get Off My Back, Saugus
by Tom Sheehan
Hey, Saugus, get off my back! Get off my back, Saugus.
You, yes, you, who preaches from Appleton’s Pulpit, you ranter and raver, you extraordinary tongue wielder, you who yells in chorus from Stackpole Field when wind brings from the banks of the lost pond voices forgotten except by you, a goodly chorus of faces and spirited ones how many times fallow for a quick generation of yells. Take back your yelling, Oh Saugus, and your cries. Get off my back, Saugus! Saugus, get off my back! You who hastily harangue from the Town Hall floor a bending of principles and fundamental yields your seeded and spirited politics have given the ages; or your echoes, oh echoes of told timbre and tonic Riverside throws up for grabs the one day trumpets cut to the quick of small argument advancing outward, when one falling leaf, nurtured by one, one old friend, comes, October’s breath and daring, to my footed path, saying his name to me, her name to me, saying we to me.
Get off my back, Saugus! Saugus, get off my back!
That trail over there, pond-sided, a boy once knew; new here, that boy, brought to duck and carp and fox, summer’s sweet immersion, winter’s scissored ice, brought to this place out of all places, brought to you, to be layered on, to be imposed, scribed and etched, by what makes you what you are, and that boy, that boy lured here to the burned edge of the pond, which lingers in the mind one second longer than all.
Get off my back, Saugus! Saugus, get off my back!
You do not come at me softly except night-shaded where the wetted, youthful, endless kiss ends sixty years later when her last picture is delivered to New Jersey, to another, an older flaming moth who knows you inside so deeply the ache is read; who knew your waters blessed us, pond, stream, river bend by bridge, marshy pools’ awesome pair wearing summer’s threatening horse shoe crabs down back of Sims’ Orchid Farm’s arms-wide spread of glass, and sticks for miles and miles of reeds promising fire, and antennae-slick worms marsh-dug for a nickel apiece, for Atlantic bait, bye the bye.
Get off my back, Saugus! Saugus, get off my back!
You take me past Eileen’s house full of ache I can still feel, the way her soft words flinched, or Honest Lawyer’s sign saying “I’m almost home,” or where a rumble under stone is but the one voice first comforted me, and my brother too, good lady of iron who talks from under granite these days of settled touch, who, landing here from Cork’s land and loving this place of yours, stays now forever, sweet incarceration.
Get off my back, Saugus! Saugus, get off my back.
Today, trekking on you, you make me think about a man I haven’t seen in fifty years, or heard, his coming out of your cut century of shadow and of shine, Phillies’s A’s and Cornet’s old-time catcher, big-mitted Sam Parker, died on Hopper‘s masterpiece device. Every day you do the same thing taking me back, grasping, clutching, your claws wrenching soul, letting me know you’re all about, on Pirates’ Hill, Standpipe Hill, Catamount Cove, where Charlie’s Pond used to be, the Pit, easterly where our river runs dim and crooked to the sea, and on all the artifacts of being, illustrious bones, tossing them up, Saugus, oh one by one tossing them up.
Ah, Saugus, will you never let go? Will you ever let me free?
Tom Sheehan served with the 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951. Books include Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans; A Collection of Friends; and From the Quickening. He has 14 Pushcart nominations, a Georges Simenon Fiction Award, and is included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2009; has 200 short stories in Rope and Wire Magazine, with print issues including Rosebud (4) and Ocean Magazine (8) among others. Poetry collections include This Rare Earth and Other Flights; Ah, Devon Unbowed; The Saugus Book; and Reflections from Vinegar Hill.
Effigy
Skin-skimmed bone —
an involution of close-folded
wings above stepped ribs
arching from a backbone
made of threaded pebbles;
pelvis white as flint,
face to the wall,
knees drawn up,
the world shut out.
Yet when he calls her name,
stone is undone, she turns
her head towards him, eyes
deep shivered wells
fractured with light.
Helen Overell has had work published in magazines including Staple, The Interpreter’s House, The Frogmore Papers and Acumen. Her first collection, Inscapes & Horizons, was published by St Albert’s Press.
Prisoner
Elizabeth Bodien (website) lives near Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania. Her poetry appears in The Fourth River, Watershed, The Litchfield Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, and Cimarron Review, among other publications, and her chapbooks include the award-winning Plumb Lines (Plan B Press 2008), Rough Terrain: Notes of an Undutiful Daughter (FootHills Publishing 2010), and Endpapers (Finishing Line Press 2011).
My Gated Community
One Sunday, if the kids are bored and your wife
Thinks you are washed up
Why don’t you do something novel, entertaining and educational
Bring them down to observe my species
At the local handicapped zoo and freak of nature reserve
There you can find me in the rare North Americans spastics
Right near the aquatic Mongoloid retards
I’ll probably be sleeping or drooling
Dressed in my native 65 poly 35 cotton sweat-suit-skin
Point out to your kids that my crooked perma-smile
Doesn’t represent happiness but rather just
Another symptom of neural firings gone wrong
Explain to them that my breed thrives in captivity
And can not easily exist among the upright ambulatory
Who consider themselves a more evolved breed
Then ever so carefully instruct junior to stick his hand
Through the bars of the cage and not to be afraid
We crave the human touch
Maurice Eidelsberg (blog, YouTube channel) had many poems published in the now defunct Quarterly, and more recently has appeared in The Cortland Review. He attended the writing program at Sarah Lawrence and almost received an MFA. He lives in Jerusalem, where he is watching the slow death of his mother. He is beautifully afflicted with a severe case of palsy. He is single and available.
Sister of All Holy Kitchens
by Kate Irving
The fiddleheads leave green approval in her palms.
She prepares them without butter.
My sister is wedded to desire for the world.
Birdcall weakens her, she wants wings.
Her garden makes a feast of departure.
She moves through morning ablutions,
repetition itself is comfort when reason
for it escapes.
This must be the opposite of a journey,
where memory recalls
the distance between desire and habit,
allying flavor with the breakage of bone,
which is why she moved into the kitchen— to sleep
amid the trinity of the daily meal.
Kate Irving grew up in New York City studying art and theater, but did time as a lyricist and studio singer. Her early poetry writing took a hiatus until much later. Her poems have previously appeared in qarrtsiluni, in Press 1, and BigCityLit (1, 2, 3). Kate is also a serious cook — a different but similarly creative outlet that nourishes.
Conversation Camp
They sent him to a conversation camp because he would not speak. Still he kept quiet. The guards, or interlocutors, as they were called, tried to worm the words out of him. Come now, they coaxed, why not speak of the weather. But he said nothing. His bunkmate, a quiet man like himself, who may or may not have been a covert interlocutor planted to make him speak, proved a comfort and a concern. In response to the man’s enquiring looks he shut his eyes tight and pressed his fists hard against them. He had no way of knowing if the man sympathized, as he was in any case replaced the next day by another. And every day the pressure mounted. It acted like a frame or a traffic light, something to bump up against to reaffirm what he had been given to believe, that there were invisible limits, barriers he could not even dream of getting beyond. Even so he had his doubt, and this doubt which he kept to himself, though they knew he had it, became a kind of currency for which he traded certain favors. Doubt fulfilled an unspoken need. A question mark to cling to as the last trace of that outmoded cache of envy and longing called self.
Peter Wortsman (PEN member profile) is the author of work in multiple modes, including a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die; two stage plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words; prose poetry in the artists’ book it-t=i, produced in collaboration with his brother, artist Harold Wortsman, and in several anthologies; travel writing in numerous newspapers, magazines and websites, and in four consecutive volumes of The Best Travel Writing; and numerous translations from the German, most recently, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist. He’s a recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award, as well as Fulbright and Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowships, and he was the Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010.
The Organ of Corti
Wanting sleep
dwarfed by this
wanting.
The radio flyer man
has finished pulling his home
across the city and sleeps
an extension of his wagon shell
dreaming his wagon dreams
in newspaper and leather jackets.
Only taxis circle the city
choosy with signs
sure of all streets
nosing their way
through the fog.
The inner ear’s instrument
Cochlea, Snail
Organ of Corti
where sound sleeps
where the fronds move in fluid
where electricity paints
for the brain.
I blame the innocent bone
for capturing the hum
of the highway
for pulling sounds
accepting silence
the unsaid rendered
in white
on white.
I sleep
and dream that 7-11
is a lighthouse
more than a lighthouse
a promise
an open door all night.
I dream I am the last pedestrian.
Jamie Houghton is a poet who lives and teaches in Bend, Oregon. She believes in using both sides of her brain, and is known for making the best key lime pie in town.
Al Capone’s Cell
by Don Schroder
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
(click on image to see a larger version)
Don Schroder is an Allentown, Pennsylvania-based travel and nature photographer. Whether shooting macro, telephoto or wide angle, Don tries to find the perspectives that capture not only the beauty of the surroundings but also the essence. When the two fall into place is when he is most satisfied with the image. To see more of his work, visit donschroder.com. Contact him for custom ink-jet prints in varying sizes.
My Cellies
My cellie was diagnosed with lung cancer. He did the chemo and the radiation therapy. What was hoped was achieved, the cancer spots shrank. Now all we had to do was get his weight back up so he can have surgery. He goes to the doctor for a routine check up. Sends word back to me that he’s going to the hospital for a few days. No big deal, he was told they’d be doing more testing; they just can’t tell us when, due to security reasons (if we knew what day we were scheduled to leave the compound, we could have an escape plan and a car waiting). Nine days go by, no word about my cellie, medical staff can’t say anything, privacy issues and all, but I’m told he’s not dead.
Now, I have an old pocket-watch hanging on my wall; my mom got it for me my first year in prison. I woke up one morning two years ago and it’s dead: died at 2:24. Just been hanging there ever since. Okay, ninth day of my cellie’s absence, my buddy got his quarterly package, he’d ordered a watch battery for me. I hook it up, it works fine.
Next morning, guard tells me to roll up my cellie’s property. “He died last night.” No details, guard doesn’t know. Jump to that afternoon, after completing my laps on the track. One of my co-workers tells me a C/O is looking for me. I track him down. He used to work in my building, knew me and my cellie. He told me he was there last night when my cellie died. He’d been on life support, they took him off to see if he could make it on his own, and he died. Why, I asked, was he on life support? C/O says, “Well, he had cancer, didn’t he?” “Yes,” I said, “but he was fine, in remission.”
Did they go ahead and do the surgery? (Which might have been malpractice, at the very least, since he wasn’t at safe weight for surgery yet. My paranoia tells me they killed him because of the multi-million dollar lawsuit he was filing. He complained about chest pains for three years before they finally gave him a chest X-ray and found the cancer. But I’m getting sidetracked here.)
“I don’t know about no surgery,” the C/O said. “I only worked the hospital last night. Just thought you’d like to know what happened. Your cellie died at 2:24 a.m.”
Poor bastard. Poor Brad.
More weirdness. The fourth day he was gone, a friend of his told me he’d had a dream my cellie died, and when he told me (in the dream) I was all broken up, crying. My response was; “Why, because he owes me 10 bucks?” I knew the dream wasn’t prophetic or anything. I knew this because I knew there was no way I’d be crying if he died. Never happen. No way, right? When I learned Brad was actually dead, my emotional response took me by complete surprise. All day long I was fighting tears. Whenever anyone would say something like “Well, he’s in a better place now,” I’d get all choked up and have to get away from whomever was speaking. Big, tough lifer.
+
A few months later, I came back from a visit and find my cell all dark. My new cellie, Jeff, had the window covers up, I thought he was sleeping. Figured I’d change out of my visiting clothes and go back out, let him get his lounge on. I went to turn on my homemade night light, which hangs under his bed on the top bunk, and as I went to connect the light cord to my extension cord, I felt warm drops hit my forearm. “I hope to hell that’s sweat,” I thought to myself. I plug in and there’s blood on my arm. Jeff’s arm is hanging off the bunk, slashed, lengthwise, wrist to elbow, dripping with blood. I look down and see I’m standing in a puddle of blood. “Jeff, what the fuck?” I said, and then turned on the overhead light. Jeff said, “I need help, John.” I told him “Okay, but I can’t fix this, you need a doctor.” He said, “Okay.”
I’d left the cell door cracked so I was able to go directly to the control booth guard and tell him, “Man down.” “Really?” he said, thought I was joking. “Open the door and let me see.” The blood was clearly visible, and he hit the alarm. Minutes later, when they dragged Jeff out of the cell, he was unconscious. The lieutenant told me that protocol dictates that I go to the hole until an investigation is completed.
They locked the unit down. There’s a gang of blood in front of my cell, along with Jeff’s bloody mattress. I ask if I should clean the cell. After all, I’m a porter. “That’s a negative,” he said. No one can enter the cell until S&I (Security and Investigation; we call them the Goon Squad) does their thing.
I wandered around to various cells to hash out the incident with some of the guys. Around 5 o’clock I asked the control guard what was going on. He says they’ve fed 1-Block, 3-Block was walking, and our block would be the last to chow. Shortly later he hollers down to me, “Purugganan, they want you to lock it up in a shower.” So I go borrow a book, then lock myself in a shower. Goon Squad shows up, cuffs me, and escorts me to the Program Office. They put me in a holding cage (picture a phone booth made of chicken wire). They leave. Come back. Take my statement. Leave. Two hours later the Lieutenant tell me that my cellie’s been stabilized, has cleared me with his statement. I’m not going to the hole. But I can’t go back to my cell, technically it’s still a crime scene, and the Goon Squad put a cap on it (which basically means no one enters the cell but their department until further notice), so he needs to find me a spot for the night. Hour and a half later he comes back and informs me there is not a single empty bunk in the entire compound, save one, in The Hole, Administrative Segregation. Ad-Seg.
I’ll save that adventure for another day. Two days later when I got back to my cell, I noticed a note taped to Jeff’s TV. No one had noticed it, not even the Goon Squad with their pictures. Jeff’s suicide note: “I’m tired of prison and I just want out. Please call my mother and tell her I’m sorry and that I’ll love her and miss her. Also my Aunt Bernice. My cellie was at a visit when this was wrote at 1:40 pm Sunday.”
I was glad to see he’d thought of me and attempted to protect me from suspicion. That night, when I was finally alone in my cell, I re-read Jeff’s note and it broke my heart. Jeff had asked to move in with me as soon as we got word my previous cellie had died. I’d known Jeff for over 10 years. We were on D-Yard together, back in the day, when it was crackin, when it was a political yard. In the cell he was respectful, courteous, and upbeat. Zero tension between us. The night before he tried to check out he was in high spirits, had gotten in touch with his mother, found she was safe from some mid-West storms. So he was, you know, glad. Next morning he’d slept in, but sat up as I was leaving for my visit to wish me a good one. And then, well, you know the rest.
+
I’m generally light hearted, even in the cell, and even when I don’t feel happy I make it a point to appear so. This, I realize, might make me somewhat inaccessible to, say, someone who might need to talk, because they’re contemplating suicide. It’s selfish. It’s me. I don’t like to do serious. Life is serious enough without being so serious about it. If had a therapist I’m sure he or she would say this is my personal defense/denial. Poor Jeff. He obviously needed someone, and wrongly chose me.
I’ve been told he’s doing fine, and is sorry for what he did. A lot of guys are angry with him. In prison, suicide is considered the ultimate act of weakness, of a coward. Everyone keeps asking if I’m okay. I’m fine. I sent him a kite: “You had a bad day, fuck it, move on.”
One cellie died. Another tried to die. What is the message the Universe is trying to send me? I’m not beating myself up over any of this. I’m much too self-centered for that. I’m more concerned that, perhaps, I’m supposed to, at the very least, be a little more serious about things. And that’s no fun.
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John Purugganan is incarcerated for life without parole in the California State Prison, Los Angeles County. His essay “You’re In Prison” appeared in The Sun magazine, October 2006, and has been re-published in several anthologies. He is also the author of six screenplays and one play.
John doesn’t have access to the Internet, but he welcomes correspondence and feedback from anyone who cares to write, and asked us to share his address:
John Purugganan, E-71364
A2-203
CSP-LAC
PO Box 4430
Lancaster, CA 93539-4430
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