Tilly Woodward

Jordan's Forest

HeartNest

Begonia Tree

Afib

Full Moon

CicadaCicada

beetlebeetle

Cascade

Golden

Moth Tea Time with Bill Carol

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Tilly Woodward graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of Kansas. She is Curator of Academic and Community Outreach at Grinnell College Museum of Art, and Founding Director of the Pella Community Art Center (1989-2007). Her work has been exhibited in more than 191 museums and galleries nationally and can be found in museum, corporate and private collections internationally and throughout the United States. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including two Fellowships for Drawing from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has initiated many arts outreach projects designed to help communities address specific social issues, foster creativity, build tolerance and compassion. She is well- known for her highly realistic, meticulously detailed oil paintings.

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Pamela Hart

Spring Snow Prison Pantoum

Wipers ticking against car windshield

While snow dissolves on glass.

March light widening like the nearby woods

I wait before class in the prison parking lot.

Spring snow dissolves, the glass is cold.

I daydream of shallow vernal pools

Waiting before class in the prison parking lot

And the potter’s field hidden by slush

Imagines a song of restive graves

One hundred names gone to ground.

The cemetery rouses its eager ghosts

Alert with beginner’s hungry mind.

One hundred names unseen by history.

My words unable to unmake 

the dead. Their stories awaken,  

Startling the daydream of vernal pools.

Words stutter and harden in the potter’s field.

Meanwhile, snow fades on empty branches.

Shimmer of spring on icy glass

Stories melting forgotten markers.

Winter escapes over tree and road.

March ghosting widely to free the names

I look with restless icy mind

As wipers click in the parking lot.

For Susan Z, 17, Who Escaped Bedford Women’s Reformatory April 1927

And Was Captured in New York City One Month Later Dressed as a Boy

According to the New York Daily News

Who threw herself under split rail 

running toward the stream – she’d heard

its hum – dodged the lights skipped over skunk cabbage

into a polyphony of oak and owl  

Among sugar maples she was no more Bedford no uplift

she’d keep her ruined self the body they’d tied

She was a tulip tree – headed for the city – 

tall resistant in pursuit of bliss not woe but mad

Who had waywardness and learned to sew

Cut her curls – hid them in quaking aspen – 

What of shame what of the murderous heart

Bolt bolt the train barked 

Who in the news photo holds hand to face

as if to recall its brief flight 

Noisy Sunday in Bedford: An Erasure

            From the New York Times January 1920

Women howling

rattling

the reformatory

their disorders

defied their keepers

we want

we want

we don’t want to stay here

The women

shouted

until 

they were exhausted

Salient Facts: The New York State Reformatory for Women, Bedford Hills 1926

Fragments from the Report

Because women

delinquent

from the great city

because foreign born

congested quarters

because economic

or social difficulties

prostitution

larceny 

receiving stolen goods

assault forgery burglary

life in the underworld

Because the hills

of Westchester County

three hundred farm acres

Mrs. Haley Fiske said

educational

for example training

laundry farming 

music athletics

the gymnasium

arts crafts

sewing

like children’s dresses

bath robes surgeons’ 

gowns brassieres

cooking including 

confections of a high grade

movies 

twice a week

Because women 

need discipline

not strait jackets

no handcuffs

though restraining sheet

corrective for the normal

the feeble-minded

neurotic taints

from a medical standpoint

Because women requiring 

specialized training 

to awaken their spiritual

consciousness

latent energies

develop strong 

maternal instinct

Because women in purity

of thought and deed

though stumbled 

temptations

in trades and occupations

restored returned

saved

to salvage

by the institution

consecrated among the hills

Mrs. Haley Fiske of the Board of Directors of the Bedford Reformatory for Women Reports to the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the House of Good Shepard April 1931

Consider that the reformatory is educational. No strait jackets or handcuffs are used. We are trying to educate. Studies of personality are made. Confinement for the girl who may need some disciplining. Deprivation of privileges. A girl may use a well-equipped gym. A girl may attend a dramatic class. There may be a restraining sheet for psychopathic cases. We are an educational institution. These sheets are used in all the hospitals in the state. We educate girls committed. 

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Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, where she teaches and manages arts-in-education programs in schools and correctional facilities. Her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton prize, was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books. She was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry finalist. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry. In addition, she has served as poetry editor for Afghan Voices, the Afghan Women's Writing Project and As You Were: The Military Review and as non-fiction reader for Consequence Forum, a journal on the consequences of war and geopolitical violence. Her poems have been published in various online and print journals.  

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Chris Bullard

Day of the Dead

Calaveras Literarias

I’d buried my past selves in desert graves

where the authorities wouldn’t look.

Now, they’ve returned, dressed in my clothes,

masked with my likeness,

assuming a seat at the table. 

Don’t they know how I’ve celebrated

the years of their absence?

I won’t share their bitter jokes.

I won’t scar the altar with their empty bottles.

I’m telling them to go.

I wish them into that outer world

beyond my caring. The soul I clawed back

from a sand filled skull, I offer only to you,

who breathed life into my remains.

Lungs

Once they seemed as innocent

as a milk bottle soul, these wings

that carried me in updrafts of breath.

Now, they appear on my CT scan

like the peppered moths darkened

by industrial melanism

in Victorian London. Unable

to catch wind, they drag me earthward,

though the longing is still there

to fly invisibly on grafted feathers

like H. C. Andersen’s fellow traveler,

an underworld man returned

from his unpaid casket to slay

the ogre and unhex the black swan,

redeeming her beauty,   

as these blots, these erasures,

this corruption in the chest,

might yet be the source of creation.

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Chris Bullard is a retired judge who lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. His poetry has appeared recently in Jersey Devil, Stonecrop, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Waccamaw and other publications. He was nominated this year for the Pushcart Prize.

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