Doing Time by Bell Gale Chevigny Read Free Book Online Page A

facing reorientation on a new turf in William Orlando’s “Dog Star Desperado” (the first chapter of a novel-in-progress), battles of rhetoric are all they can afford. Like the “dozens” played on ghetto streets and the rough banter of the armed services, this patois allows its performers to position themselves against one another while strutting their stuff. It also offers them a kind of collective armor as they size up their new surroundings and their new keepers, who are also pulled into the force field of prison language.
    On another level, Orlando’s story enacts the galvanizing of the spirit to meet the shock of dehumanization. In their own way, women, too, cultivate such resources. In “Arrival” here, for example, Judee Norton calls up the inviolable inner liberty of the Stoics and converts her shackles into jewelry. Her summoning of her innermost self marks her starting point as she begins to do time.
Prison Letter
M. A.Jones
    You ask what it’s like here
but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that men
die hearing their own voices. That answer
isn’t right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hand —
    But that’s not right either. There are no
flowers in these cells, no water
and I hold nothing in my hands
but fear, what lives
in the absence of light, emptying
from my body to fill the large darkness
rising like water up my legs:
    It rises and there are no words for it
though I look for them, and turn
on light and watch it
fall like an open yellow shirt
over black water, the light holding
against the dark for just
an instant: against what trembles
in my throat, a particular fear
a word I have no words for.
    1982, Arizona State Prison-perryville
    Buckeyc, Arizona
Siempre
William Aberg
    She tells me through the vent
from the cell below
that they’re taking her
on the morning train to che pittta,
that the guards have already packed
everything but her sheets, blue jumpsuit, and towel.
    Through the floor,
with my heart as with an eye,
I can see her as she sits
on the bunk, face
cupped in her hands,
elbows propped on her thighs,
cheeks smudged by fingermarks
and tears, her dark
hair eclipsing her knees.
    I try to reassure her
with wisdom I do not have,
and hope I try to fake,
that the hammer
and anvil of coming days
will forge us into
something stronger.
    By the time they unlock
my cell at breakfast,
she has already gone. But later
as I walk back in my boxers
from the shower, an older guard,
the kind one, slips a note
into my hand, whispers,
She sent her love. Back in my cell
I unfold a note that says,
Te amo, siempre in crude letters
formed by a finger and menstrual blood.
    1994, Pima County Jail
    Tucson, Arizona
Dog Star Desperado
William Orlando
    It had been a journey.
    We were bussed from USP Leavenworth during one of those polar Novembers in Kansas. It was a day cold and white and hushed, a solitary morning of the snows.
    Our prison transport showed its age. It looked as knackered as some of the convicts it had aboard — men in bad flesh who’d let themselves go, turning gray with the years and bitter for it. The bus smelled funny. The odor of cigarette butts and rusted apple cores, the odor of stale, brooding sweat. A prisoner smell. We sat in our chains and stared holes through the bus windows. We had little rap for one another, anyway. Most of us were just faces — a surly face that grunted at you over a morning bowl of grits. We were content to look hard and forbidding. Desperadoes all.
    Those that did talk, talked shop. Who was hot and snitchin’. Who got stabbed and good for the motherfucker. Who bugged out. Who