Free Doing Time by Bell Gale Chevigny Page A

that look like they belong in a room somewhere else.”
    â€œI’m just getting dug in,” I replied in defense, annoyed that my efforts at avoiding reality had been detected.
    â€œThis isn’t getting dug in, this is foolishness. You’re in a penitentiary — a tough one. You should never try to forget that. Never try to make yourself believe you’re somewhere else. Do you know what a lit match could do to this cell?”
    His words struck an unnerving chord. Only a few months earlier, I had watched a man whose cell across the way had been deliberately set on fire. He had screamed and banged helplessly on his locked door, flames dancing around him, biting at his flesh. Through his cell window, I could see billowing black smoke envelope his pleading, twisted, horrified face until he disappeared. It had taken some time before guards responded to his screams.
    The very next day I gave away my books, magazines, newspapers, art supplies. I knew I had to fight as hard for my safety as I did for my sanity.
    1995, State Correctional Institution Rockview
    Bellefonte, Pennsylvania
Arrival
Judee Norton
    bright shiny bracelets
    jangling on my arm
    wide leather belt
    snug about my waist
    chains dangling seductively
    Â Â Â Â  between my legs.
    I am captured
    but not subdued
    THEY
    think they have me
    but
    my mind
    Â Â Â Â  wheels and soars and spins and shouts
    no prisoner
    I am free
    Â Â Â Â  to look to see all that I ever have been all that I ever may be

    I hold the small and sacred part of me close
    like a royal flush
    Â Â  my poker face
    Â  must not betray
    THEY
    cannot touch it
    Â  not even in their dreams
    I
    am light and air and fire
    I
    slip through their clutching fingers
    Â Â Â Â  like the night
    even as they grasp my puny wrist
    Â Â Â  of simple bone
    Â Â Â  and blood
    Â Â Â  and flesh
    body here
    spirit there
    I
    Â Â Â  am still
    Â Â Â Â  free.
    1990, Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville
    Goodyear, Arizona

Time and Its Terms
    It is so peaceful on the bank of the river, one can almost forget youth tick tick ticking its way into memory.
    Coming to terms with time is a solitary, existential experience, forever the province of poets. Poets know time’s brevity, its repeats and deceits, and also how rhythm mimics time, how imagination cheats it. Loss of physical freedom compounds and intensifies these universal experiences, as Henry Johnson knows, viewing the Hudson from Sing Sing in “Sailboats”* excerpted above.
    The state reduces the stuff of time, as it does the captured human, to number. It makes time the prisoner’s only possession, while emptying it. The state’s appropriation of human time and domination of its meaning is epitomized in the harshness of the “count,” for which prisoners must at regular intervals be locked in their cells. In “Counting Time” by M. D. Goldenberg (1985),* “The officers count / the prisoners / The prisoners count / the days / The days count / for nothing.” Doing time is also doing space, for the temporal distortion is paralleled by tyrannical control of space, as William Aberg’s poem “Reductions” hete discloses.
    Like a sorry mathematician, Derrick Corley worries the impossible calculus of space and time, punishment and ctime. In “Cell” (1996),”‘ he notes that his is getting smaller: “I wonder how / they do that / taking a little more / each day.” Asked name in “Arrest,”* Corley says “Methuselah”; asked age, “a thousand.” They “thought me mad / when I was just so very — weary / to find myself yet again / made old by my actions.” Others recover human time and space in fragments of dream (like Jackie Ruzas in “Where or When”) or in a scrap of music or of fantasy (like M. A. Jones in two poems here). Some try to do time on their own terms. They