Browse Topics
Incarceration
What Is Left
I spent twelve years in the state penitentiary for crimes imagined by children and believed by adults. For those twelve years, my body became my enemy and my commodity — I let the inmates hurt me so I could live. Besides the common abuses, they also broke my fingers and thumbs and sometimes the little bones in my hands. Once, they shattered a wrist.
October 2007
Letters Of Light From A Dark Place
Things go wrong. Call it entropy or original sin or plain old human suffering. Once it gains momentum, life can go downhill at an astonishing rate. Bad decisions are famously blamed, and one I made thirty years ago eventually led to a twenty-two-year prison sentence, which I’m still serving.
September 2007
Confinement
I don’t remember the exact moment when I stopped seeing chemotherapy as a sort of adventure, a necessary bit of healthcare after a breast-cancer diagnosis, through which I would do my best to be a good girl, bright and brave. Maybe it was when I first encountered the nurses wearing plastic smocks to protect them from what they injected into me.
August 2007
Selected Poems
You said you thought the word was pure / to describe the moonlight above us / on our last night in boarding school, / when you and I broke the rules and slept / outside under a blanket of young summer.
— from “To My Lifelong Friend Going To Prison”
June 2007I Was A Guantánamo Prisoner
I walked slowly up Mill Hill Road in Woodstock, New York. A rope tied my feet together; another bound my hands. A third rope, around my waist, was attached to the woman in front of me. A black hood covered my face. The rest of my wardrobe was an orange jumpsuit, like the ones worn by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
March 2007
The Full Catastrophe
Unless you show up to write, you don’t get to experience the heartache and the joy of writing; you don’t get to drop into a place without words and then, miraculously, find just the right words for what you discover there.
December 2006
You’re In Prison
It’s not like in the movies. That stuff really happens, but it doesn’t all happen in an hour and a half, in three acts that build to a dramatic conclusion, like it does on the big screen. You think it’s going to be exactly like that, especially after you’ve been convicted and sentenced, and you’re still being housed at the county jail, and some guy asks if you’ve ever been to the “pen.”
October 2006
The Ultimate Kindness
War and peace start in the hearts of individuals. Strangely enough, even though all beings would like to live in peace, our method for obtaining peace over the generations seems not to be very effective: we seek peace and happiness by going to war. This can occur at the level of our domestic situation, in our relationships with those close to us.
September 2006
Decisions
To pull the plug, to go from judgment to acceptance, to leave a marriage
April 2006
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