Pamela Hart

Spring Snow Prison Pantoum

Wipers ticking against car windshield

While snow dissolves on glass.

March light widening like the nearby woods

I wait before class in the prison parking lot.

Spring snow dissolves, the glass is cold.

I daydream of shallow vernal pools

Waiting before class in the prison parking lot

And the potter’s field hidden by slush

Imagines a song of restive graves

One hundred names gone to ground.

The cemetery rouses its eager ghosts

Alert with beginner’s hungry mind.

One hundred names unseen by history.

My words unable to unmake 

the dead. Their stories awaken,  

Startling the daydream of vernal pools.

Words stutter and harden in the potter’s field.

Meanwhile, snow fades on empty branches.

Shimmer of spring on icy glass

Stories melting forgotten markers.

Winter escapes over tree and road.

March ghosting widely to free the names

I look with restless icy mind

As wipers click in the parking lot.

For Susan Z, 17, Who Escaped Bedford Women’s Reformatory April 1927

And Was Captured in New York City One Month Later Dressed as a Boy

According to the New York Daily News

Who threw herself under split rail 

running toward the stream – she’d heard

its hum – dodged the lights skipped over skunk cabbage

into a polyphony of oak and owl  

Among sugar maples she was no more Bedford no uplift

she’d keep her ruined self the body they’d tied

She was a tulip tree – headed for the city – 

tall resistant in pursuit of bliss not woe but mad

Who had waywardness and learned to sew

Cut her curls – hid them in quaking aspen – 

What of shame what of the murderous heart

Bolt bolt the train barked 

Who in the news photo holds hand to face

as if to recall its brief flight 

Noisy Sunday in Bedford: An Erasure

            From the New York Times January 1920

Women howling

rattling

the reformatory

their disorders

defied their keepers

we want

we want

we don’t want to stay here

The women

shouted

until 

they were exhausted

Salient Facts: The New York State Reformatory for Women, Bedford Hills 1926

Fragments from the Report

Because women

delinquent

from the great city

because foreign born

congested quarters

because economic

or social difficulties

prostitution

larceny 

receiving stolen goods

assault forgery burglary

life in the underworld

Because the hills

of Westchester County

three hundred farm acres

Mrs. Haley Fiske said

educational

for example training

laundry farming 

music athletics

the gymnasium

arts crafts

sewing

like children’s dresses

bath robes surgeons’ 

gowns brassieres

cooking including 

confections of a high grade

movies 

twice a week

Because women 

need discipline

not strait jackets

no handcuffs

though restraining sheet

corrective for the normal

the feeble-minded

neurotic taints

from a medical standpoint

Because women requiring 

specialized training 

to awaken their spiritual

consciousness

latent energies

develop strong 

maternal instinct

Because women in purity

of thought and deed

though stumbled 

temptations

in trades and occupations

restored returned

saved

to salvage

by the institution

consecrated among the hills

Mrs. Haley Fiske of the Board of Directors of the Bedford Reformatory for Women Reports to the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the House of Good Shepard April 1931

Consider that the reformatory is educational. No strait jackets or handcuffs are used. We are trying to educate. Studies of personality are made. Confinement for the girl who may need some disciplining. Deprivation of privileges. A girl may use a well-equipped gym. A girl may attend a dramatic class. There may be a restraining sheet for psychopathic cases. We are an educational institution. These sheets are used in all the hospitals in the state. We educate girls committed. 

---

Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, where she teaches and manages arts-in-education programs in schools and correctional facilities. Her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton prize, was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books. She was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry finalist. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry. In addition, she has served as poetry editor for Afghan Voices, the Afghan Women's Writing Project and As You Were: The Military Review and as non-fiction reader for Consequence Forum, a journal on the consequences of war and geopolitical violence. Her poems have been published in various online and print journals.  

toc

next

Chris Bullard

Day of the Dead

Calaveras Literarias

I’d buried my past selves in desert graves

where the authorities wouldn’t look.

Now, they’ve returned, dressed in my clothes,

masked with my likeness,

assuming a seat at the table. 

Don’t they know how I’ve celebrated

the years of their absence?

I won’t share their bitter jokes.

I won’t scar the altar with their empty bottles.

I’m telling them to go.

I wish them into that outer world

beyond my caring. The soul I clawed back

from a sand filled skull, I offer only to you,

who breathed life into my remains.

Lungs

Once they seemed as innocent

as a milk bottle soul, these wings

that carried me in updrafts of breath.

Now, they appear on my CT scan

like the peppered moths darkened

by industrial melanism

in Victorian London. Unable

to catch wind, they drag me earthward,

though the longing is still there

to fly invisibly on grafted feathers

like H. C. Andersen’s fellow traveler,

an underworld man returned

from his unpaid casket to slay

the ogre and unhex the black swan,

redeeming her beauty,   

as these blots, these erasures,

this corruption in the chest,

might yet be the source of creation.

---

Chris Bullard is a retired judge who lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. His poetry has appeared recently in Jersey Devil, Stonecrop, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Waccamaw and other publications. He was nominated this year for the Pushcart Prize.

toc

next

Esther Sadoff

I tell my mother I want to triumph over evil

Meaning triumph over the tiny orange leaf 

falling in my coffee cup, triumph over the bathing suit 

I left out to dry on the porch and forgot,

triumph over the laundry machine's leaky tangle

of black tubes dripping on the floor. 

I want to vanquish the voice inside my head — 

the dark twine squeezing my heart like floss 

wrapped around a finger. My mother tells me to be thankful, 

to stay the course but all I hear are all 

the other courses slamming their doors. 

At 8 am my mother is out walking the foster dog. 

She is teaching her not to run after rabbits, 

to sit by the lake and just notice the ducks.

When she sees a construction crane, they stop to stare at that too. 

When did I forget about the power of exposure? 

When did I forget about the invisible forces around me? 

Seeing is only one dimension of experience. 

My mother tries to tell me which way to go

but it's much easier to train a dog. 

Still I try to tell myself the tiny leaf 

falling into my coffee cup is a sign of luck,

the bathing suit left under the stars

harvests the scent of the wind.

My mother goes to the wedding in Boston

She takes pictures of stone walls, flowers, and sends them to me — 

stones like a row of old teeth in a forgotten mouth. 

My mother pretends to be a tour guide, announces

in her best tour-guide voice, There was a battle here and there 

but please don't ask any questions because I don't know 

the answer  and you won't remember the answer anyway.

That night I can barely hear her over the sound 

of blaring music. She is shouting, Do you know this song? 

All the people here know this song!

She is sitting with former students, all grown up.

I nod and smile even though I'm in my backyard alone at night. 

Do you remember Emily, Kelly, Jane? 

So many faces and facts I try to remember — 

dates of battles, piano lessons, students who moved away. 

I say Yes, I do. How could I forget? even though I don't remember — 

a blurred, kaleidoscope-tour of places, sights, and sounds.

A tour where everything remains nameless — 

though if you don't call a wall a wall,

it's still a pile of stones. It still stands. 

At my sister's house my mother can't sleep

She can't wait to cut more bushes, 

to chop the overgrown hedge to a stump,

to brush plants away from the stone path. 

She wants to believe that the garden needs this and it does. 

In the mid-August heat the foliage is near tropical, 

vines growing over everything, 

trees hanging low with heavy limbs, 

so in the morning my mother can't wait

to do more. She breathes easier, bearing

the earth to the sun, even though my sister 

insists the yard was fine as it was before.

I think my mother wakes the same way I do —

each day a rushing forward, a tingling

in the fingers and feet. The best days 

being the most full and there's no end

to what we’ll try to cram in in a day.

We both know a day can grow legs and run away

so my mother and I wake up running.

Even if we don't see the birds they keep on flying. 

When my sister goes to Singapore I get the what ifs 

What if the plane drops out of the sky like a bag of groceries?

What if her compression socks unthread themselves into a loosened ball of yarn? 

What if the dog runs in circles in the backyard until there's no breath left? 

What if the air hardens itself into a wall and no one can breathe anymore? 

Somehow she arrives. When she is twelve hours ahead of time, 

she sleeps when I wake and she wakes when I sleep.

She's on the other side of a cassette tape that I can only play backwards. 

When I call her on the phone I see our words like ants marching 

across a telephone wire. One ant at a time crawls through the phone

 then the ants all march away into the summer night.

She sends pictures of herself by the water, waves frozen in time like a blue gel. 

She sends pictures of a sign that says Caution! Downhill! Be safe! Be alert!

But the picture is not real. It has no bones or skin.

It does not breathe. It can not ride a bike. It can not sip 

a bowl of too-hot soup, lay its head on a pillow, and say goodnight. 

When my father can find no reason 

to wake he thinks of making pancakes 

for himself and my mother. 

I can’t think of a better reason to rise

though I'm no newcomer to the land of emptiness,

cold as a crow’s caw on a gray morning. 

Growing up, he let me drop in blueberries 

and chocolate chips onto the pooling batter —  

5 blueberries per pancake or 7 chocolate chips. 

Today I wake with no appetite but I eat 

my father's pancakes when I can.  

My father says a prayer for each home-cooked meal. 

My mother calls him sacrilegious,

as this breakfast prayer is to no real god, 

but  to the god of savings; though I don't think of money

saved but of saving the morning — 

ray after ray of dimmed amber light poured into the syrup,

a wash of clouds stirred into the coffee,

four hills of golden pancakes,

followed by  my mother's eye rolls and heavy sigh 

at the end of the prayer 

where we lift our joined hands to the sky. 

---

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Her debut chapbooks, Some Wild Woman and Serendipity in France, are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

toc

next