Leigh Mackelvey
I enjoy writing in the epistolary form and was excited to learn that Poemelon: A Journal of Poetry was to publish an issue with contributions written in this form. My poem, “eastern state penitentiary, 1830”, was written after I toured this old prison in Philadelphia with a group of writers from a workshop. Eighteenth Century prisons were merely holding grounds for criminals whose illegal acts ranged from the stealing of bread to murder. In 1879 Eastern State Penitentiary opened as a new prison innovation. The purpose was to do away with corporal punishment during the inmates stay and to isolate them in cells so that they had no communication within the prison. This was to allow them to “think within” of their sins and to attain a penitent attitude. This system failed, but the word penitentiary remained.
The epistolary form lends itself to the writing of a persona poem. I imagined a speaker whose only communication was through letters to loved ones. He writes his letter as a means to describe his emotions about the prison and his personal “change” during his time in his isolated cell. By communicating letter form, the poet is given a certain tool in which to be in conversation with herself, the text, and the reader.
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eastern state penitentiary, 1830
(from your billy)
“Thrown into solitude, the prisoner reflects …”
Alexis de Tocqueville
dearie,
they beat me all the way to isolation, threw me in the klondike.
footsteps muffle now, as they pass by,
ready to haul me out for worse. they tell me
gouge deep, scour inside, scoop out them sins and sob like ya’ mean it.
hell, weren’t it that same wickedness what got me in this house?
it ain’t no good to rot in a damn cell, hug the rusty coils of this heater, reveal to it
my every theft of a cold biscuit, how I’m this running sore of a man.
a cross hangs in here, but it ain’t what’s got hold of me,
just two thin boards stuck together.
no, it’s the light, i tell you, the light what hung there, then lived.
it comes when i raise my eyes, befriends me
lies next to me close,
closer even than us.
see, it’s the light what’s gonna swirl me beyond the silence after the sizzle chair,
up through the ceiling, past the catwalk,
clear of the searchlights that spot nothing of my flight on tongues of flame.
darlin’,
it ain’t the “big fry” what fears me,
what saddens me is that you ain’t never seen me like this,
fresh, the dawn reborn.
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Leigh Mackelvey lives in Mullica Hill, New Jersey and teaches 4th, 5th & 6th graders in an inner city school across the bridge from Philadelphia. Her work is in Shot Glass Journal, Blood Lotus Literary Journal and is forthcoming in issues of Faithwriters. She received a fellowship from Arts Horizon and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from National University, La Jolla, CA. When not teaching, Leigh reads lots of P. D. James and Elizabeth George and envisions solving English mysteries from a flat in London.