Parker Lake is beautiful. The pine trees glisten in the sun, snow gleaming against the dark green of the boughs. One could become very serene here, I think, as I park in the lot by the front door of the low concrete building that is the Women’s Correctional Facility. I am here to be corrected for my crime of trespassing on the property of the Honeywell Corporation fifteen months ago. Many of us sat down outside the gates, waiting for the opportunity to talk with the corporate heads of Honeywell about our deep concern over the making of cluster bombs and MX missiles; about our children and our wish that they might have a whole life to live and our belief that they won’t if places like Honeywell continue the course they are on.

A matron asks lots of questions and gives us forms to fill out. I put down “Sufi” under religion because I brought a book about the Sufis with me, and don’t fill out the race question – small rebellions against authority. She takes my coat and scarf and car keys. I have no money, no contraband, no nail files, no belts, no brooches, no potential weapons. She cares as much about divesting me of weapons in here as I cared about divesting Honeywell of weapons out there. I am led through the heavy iron gate into a small room and told to strip, bend over, spread legs, toes, fingers, ears, and sent to the shower to de-louse. My clothes are searched while I shower. I am asked if there’s anything I want before I am locked up. Toothpaste, I say. She says okay, but promptly forgets. I am led to a small concrete cell; the door clangs shut behind me.

Small box, antiseptic, cold, concrete. I make my bed, cover the lumpy blue plastic mattress with a sheet, a thin white spread, feel drowsy, lie down. I read the names of those who were here before me, written on the door’s portal:

Sheryl S and Mina,

Wenona for 10 days in May,

Lee Lyn Baker,

Valerie Kingbird who loves Teddy Bigbear,

and Joyce Knox for 2 days

and Sharon who loves Jerry

and Ellen Dick

and Bunny

and David Deegan’s sweetie,

and Kaz

and Kris.

Every fifteen minutes the guard comes by and looks through the tiny window on my door with its thin metal flap hanging down (hanging down on the outside so that she can clap it against the light and the sounds of the hallway at her discretion, not mine). She checks out my activities and writes them on a paper taped to the wall outside my cell: “Reading, resting, sitting at desk, exercising.” I read, yes. I doze. I’m reading about the Sufis, who believe that the material world and the metaphysical world are inextricably linked. We become what we grasp on to, like the moth becomes the flame it inevitably flies into.

We are what we eat. They feed us hot dogs and sugared baked beans, white bread and sweet pickles. And coffee. I get a shot of energy from the sugar and the caffeine, and then become fiercely drowsy. I feel drugged as the long day drags on and wonder if they have piped gas through the small vent over the toilet at the foot of my bed. It would not surprise me.

The young Hispanic woman at my lunch table is a waitress, DWI. “At least I’ll get a good night’s sleep,” she says. “The first in a long time.” She’d been here before. “For a flat year,” she says. I don’t have the courage to ask her why. The answer is in her face – scars and pockmarks and the slow sleepy look around her eyes and the shaking hands as she lights her cigarette. And the K-Mart clothes. And the poverty. Only the poor are here.

Sheryl S and Mina,

Wenona for 10 days in May,

Lee Lyn Baker,

Valerie Kingbird who loves Teddy Bigbear,

and Joyce Knox for 2 days

and Sharon who loves Jerry

and Ellen Dick

and Bunny

and David Deegan’s sweetie,

and Kaz

and Kris.

They lock you up in a small, square box, where the air is stale and stuffy and your body feels too cold but seems too hot and they smile as they take away your nail file and your opened cigarette packs and as they ask you to strip, bend over, shake your hair, fold in your ears – a hands-off strip search because they are humane in this institution; and they feed you lots of sugar and you sleep and you walk up and down around the edges of your cell and you lie on your side on the blue plastic mattress because it’s too lumpy to lie on your back; and you listen to the voices droning in your head, droning in the hallway, and the constant sound of metal against metal, doors opening and closing, gates shutting, keys that hang from the leather belts of the guards’ waists hitting each other, and the echo of calls and low cries, unrecognizable in the ringing, metallic air; and you sleep a kind of death-sleep, dream of being awake perhaps, and you don’t let it bother you because you are cool about it all; and you have your pride and hold on to your name because they can’t strip away your name and you write it on the wall around the cell door for anyone else to see who sits here inside this concrete block, to remember, to hold inside their memories so that you will not be forgotten, abandoned forever inside this “correctional facility” where they take away your experience and your cigarettes and your clothes and your age, for you are an unruly child to them, and your kinship, for you are an enemy to them, but they cannot take away your name:

Sheryl S and Mina,

Wenona for 10 days in May,

Lee Lyn Baker,

Valerie Kingbird who loves Teddy Bigbear,

and Joyce Knox for 2 days

and Sharon who loves Jerry

and Ellen Dick

and Bunny

and David Deegan’s sweetie,

and Kaz

and Kris

and Martha.