Notes from Exile: Bunkies
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
Life in a federal prison camp compresses everything. Sixty-four pods, each roughly the size of a walk-in closet, house two inmates at a time. You don’t always choose who shares that space with you. Sometimes you ask. Sometimes they ask you. Often, the decision is made for you.
Like much of prison life, the experience unfolds slowly, then all at once.
BUNKIES
Anxious moments
when he
arrives.
Sometimes you pick
him,
most times you
don’t,
and sometimes he asks
you, the worst of
times.
You can’t choose your
moments,
a space too small for
that.
And over time you both
emerge.
No hiding in the prison
camp.
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