Prison Camp: Handcuffs
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
What follows is another of my early writings in prison and again employing streaming prose to capture the disorientation, the breathless, ineffable experience that marked this new world to which I arrived as if falling down a well.
HANDCUFFS
are more complicated than you think because there is the pull around and I wasn’t even sure what the guard wanted me to do and when I finally figured it out he was already pissed at me and he finally got the first cuff on my right wrist but was struggling to get the other one on and I moved my arms closer to make it easier for him but that didn’t work and made it harder for him and he got even more pissed off and the first cuff was already bruising and cutting into my right wrist and I couldn’t help but move it to make it more comfortable which put him in a rage and so there was more pulling of my arms and finally he turned me back around and shouted at me to stop fucking this up and then he turned me around again and then I didn’t know what I was doing but making all sorts of movements and then no movement and finally he got both cuffs on and I could feel them squeezing and the left one was cutting into my wrist and he started to drag me somewhere but I had no idea where we were going and I didn’t dare move my wrists anymore and I kept trying to keep up with him but those cuffs were digging into my writst and cutting me all the more and I realized I had a long way to go to figure out prison.
This prose poem was published in a collection of my prose poems published by Moonstone Press. You can purchase the collection here: A Different Kind of Hell.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More Streams from prison
If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.
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