by Mary K O'Melveny
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| For the past 27 years, Dennis Wayne Hope (above) has been in a Texas prison cell that is somewhere between the size of an elevator and a compact parking space. For one hour, seven days per week, or two hours, five days per week, he is let out to exercise—alone—in another small enclosure. The only people he comes into contact with are the guards who strip search and handcuff him. The last personal phone call he had was in 2013 when his mother died. More than a quarter-century in isolation has led him to hallucinations, chronic pain and thoughts of suicide. Solitary confinement is a sanitized term for torture. Mr. Hope, 53, whose plight was described by the New York Times, has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case on the grounds that his prolonged isolation is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment. Lower courts denied Mr. Hope’s petition and court observers are skeptical the Supreme Court will take up his case. So sure are Texas officials that the court, with its conservative majority, won’t agree to hear the case that they waived their right to respond to Mr. Hope’s petition for a writ of certiorari. —The Washington Post, February 16, 2022 |
For twenty-seven years,
I have not seen a bird’s shadow.
Nor felt a droplet of rain.
No one has touched me
save the guards who strip-search
me to take me to an indoor
cubicle for solitary weekly
exercise. They do hold my hands,
to fix them to steel handcuffs
required for our walks down
cement block hallways of a
Texas prison. In 2013, I received
my only telephone call.
My mother was dead.
Last month, my lawyers asked
the Supreme Court to weigh
the parameters of punishment,
to tell me if unusualness or
cruelty come to their minds
in circumstances such as mine.
Some say prison focuses one’s
viewpoint. If it tends toward
the myopic, there is good reason.
I would ask them to focus
their eyes on distant objects –
a task I can no longer perform
because my narrowed world
affords no view of light or distance.
A compact car would be too large
to park in my 6x9 foot cell.
Next, I would ask them to consider
how vocal cords can atrophy,
as muscle, ligament, mucosal
tissue diminish from lack of use.
I did not take a vow of silence
when I entered this place
but my voice has hollowed
as its volume faded and its pitch
turned to a thin reed-like whisper.
At first, I talked to myself. Even
sang. But soon enough, I was
not enough. Words failed me.
Now, my head aches constantly.
My heart pounds, my pulse races
as if I was running up a mountainside.
But all I do is sit on my metal slab
or stand and watch walls wave, shift
as though a fan was moving them
like air. Sometimes, demon spirits peek
through wearing pinpricks of light.
Some say if you do the crime,
you can’t complain about the time.
But duration and despair should not be one.
I do not sleep. I have no sense of space
or stage. My brain must work overtime
to construct reality from scant available
signals. I read about a 1950’s experiment
on rhesus macaque monkeys. After thirty
days of isolation, they turned away from
social interaction, became disconsolate.
Each day I remember less. Less.
I hope the Justices will answer me
while I still know my name. While I can
still name most things I have lost.
Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY. Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.