Notes from Exile: Covid-19
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
In my last Prison Camp post, FAREWELL TO PRISON, I described the uneasy final months before my release: the waiting, the false hopes, and the small rituals that held the days together.
Around that same time, COVID-19 swept through the country, and through the prison system. But for many of us, it didn’t come as fear; it came as a strange form of hope. The pandemic that trapped the world outside began to open doors inside. Early releases, home confinements, compassionate discharges.
This stream of consiousness, prose poem, Covid-19 or The Plague, written during that surreal period, depicts the strange mix of dread and deliverance that overtook the camp. It appears in my chapbook, A DIFFERENT KIND OF HELL.
COVID 19- OR THE PLAGUE
I started counting the deaths in earnest around March when it looked like the numbers were piling up and I could start to think about getting out of here and I didn’t care that it was ghoulish to keep on that way but my friends and me were aligned on this because it was the only way out and so we started to root for the daily count to get to five hundred dead a day and then one thousand and then it was two thousand and we were getting sick at thirty thousand a day and I found myself looking at the news first thing and before final bedcheck to get the daily count of new cases and deaths in Massachusetts where my prison resided and gathering at our bunks and huddled at our tables in the dining hall and every other chance to exchange reports on the plague outside but also the fear of getting it rising as the warden came himself to threaten us if we didn’t wear masks and wash our hands and sending some guys to solitary for not wearing their masks which wasn’t easy washing dishes for five hours in the heat of the kitchen and almost choking on that mask and taking our temperatures every day at Four O’clock but all of us still piled up shoulder to shoulder and sharing toilets and everyone a threat so it became clearer and clearer that the plague was not a plague at all since it couldn’t be with a name like that and was instead the secret combination to the lock that confines us and all we had to do was follow it C-O-V-I-D-1-9 and the door would open. And it did.
This poem is from my collection A Different Kind of Hell, written during my time in a federal prison camp and published by Moonstone Press.
📖 Order A Different Kind of Hell here Moonstone Press
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