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.
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.