Issue #7 - A Prison Psalter
A Prison Psalter
For Prisons and Correctional Institutions
Remember those who work in these institutions; keep them humane and compassionate; and save them from becoming brutal or callous. And since what we do for those in prison, O Lord, we do for you, constrain us to improve their lot.
- Prayers and Thanksgivings, #37, The Book of Common Prayer
A Corrections Officer Quarantines at the Clements Unit
On the northeast side of Amarillo
thirty-seven hundred violent inmates
are quarantined for crimes such as murder—
capital and multiple— continued
abuse of a child, indecent and lewd
exposure, several habitual burglars,
assault— on disabled persons and spouses/mates.
Each sentenced from four years to life without parole. No
death chambers here, though. Human depravity
has a scent: poorly ventilated cell
blocks and a diet of foul prison food.
The air thick, dyspeptic, smears the concrete
passages with a humid plaque. The mete
between men doesn’t exist. We have chewed
each other’s stench, coughed each other’s phlegm, pell-
melled our wasted cells. Outside, the city
cannot hear the coughing, the liquid gasp,
the odd kind of sympathy to cough in kind.
They cannot feel the twice-breathed air syncopate.
Barometric pointers beat as though they were a metronome.
In twelve hours, I’ll punch the clock and go home,
after I count sick men as they expectorate
on the floors. At hour twelve, I’ll find
mucus on my uniform. With the venom of an asp,
I’ll kiss my kids when I get home and dream
that every mouth was stopped. The whole world
held accountable.
…Remember all prisoners, and bring the guilty to repentance and amendment of life according to your will, and give them hope for their future… - BCP
Inmates Read the King James Psalms
TDCJ ID: 02183481
Deadly Conduct.
4 years.
Age 20.
Psalm 13
How long wilt thou forget me? Wilt. Lettuce wilts.
I forget the crisp of unwilt lettuce.
I wisht I could taste it, tasteless though it was.
That crisp is lost to my brain, like
Momma’s face, the first thing I remember forgetting.
How long wilt thou hide thy face? I aint
seen thy face to know it’s hid. If I did,
you didn’t introduce thyself as you.
I take counsel in my soul which knows
enough to know itself aint you, although
sometimes I think I’m Thou. Who else do I
answer to? How long shall mine enemy
be exalted over me? Who aint mine
enemy, I’ll ask back? My cellmate, the
guards, the warden, the State, even Momma,
whose face I forget? I do remember
her forehead set like a wall against me,
each way I turned. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.
He hath dealt bountifully with me. He
hath given me six feet by eight feet, square.
Lord Jesus, for our sake you were condemned as a criminal: Visit our jails and prisons with your pity and judgment. - BCP
TDCJ ID: 02290142
Aggravated Assault of a Child.
7000 years.
Age 41
Psalm 8
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, and the hum and the buzz and the blue flicker of the fluorescent tubes that wink and exasperate for years like an overhead highway stripe, flashing the marked path with lights but nonlights to burn without ceasing night and non-night, projecting on my closed eyes a map of blinking veins, so that, if my eyes could focus, I could consider the vision of my own pulse, kept steady by my unsleeping lizard brain, yet the what-is-man-that-thou-art-mindful-of-him part of me is up, which means I lean on the cell door attempting to name each noise on the block: wall taps, snoring, roaches under my feet, bosses ascending and descending the metal grate stairs, pacing the catwalk where I can see the soles of their boots as they pass over me, and beyond them the impenetrable ceiling, and below me the inviolable floor, and if somehow I could break free, past these guards, past these walls, I’d be standing in the concrete yard under the sealed vault of floodlights, the mouth of a babe testifying against me.