Life Sentence
BY LAURA MADELEINE WISEMAN
The Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind
Faribault, Minnesota, January 1881
What to do
with thoughts
but commit them
to paper, as I did
in an asylum yesterday
when I visited
women who rocked
with hysteria,
wombs dislodged
from behind their navels
to crawl everywhere—
against their hearts,
in their throats,
around and around
their spine—in the body,
and like them
I have little
money and few rights
of my own, but I have
a pen in my hand
and today the ink
resembles hope.