In county jail, the toilets flush hard,
hard enough to leave a bruise behind you
if you're too slow.
I'm too slow, but I learned to be fast.
I learned to think faster.
Hurry up, they all say there,
Hurry up,
and wait.
I waited to use the bathroom
for 20 hours after my wrists were first cuffed.
I sat on my thoughts
instead of a throne,
and stewed.
Less than a year later, I made stew in a trashbag
and stored it in a toilet we emptied,
after we borrowed the toilet brush.
One brush for a hundred and twenty girls
and no cleaning chemicals,
because they only trust girls like us
when we're fighting fires
for people worth saving.
No cleaning chemicals,
because we're all diseased
to them.
So we did what we could, scrubbed it
and emptied it.
The girls in other counties empty their toilets.
They're housed on the 2nd floor,
and the boys are housed below.
If you empty the toilets, you can talk through them.
Flirt through them.
Promise through them.
They get through their trials that way,
preferring a place to put their love
over a place to put their
waste.
There's so much waste.
We flush it all.
The girls perch on top,
sliding their fingers into themselves
to remove drugs smuggled in.
They reach inside
and pull a new reality
off their shelf.
It isn't a euphemism,
it's a sanitation issue,
and a damn waste.
There's so much waste.
Flush it down.
You're locked up,
sometimes for days in a cell.
In prison, the toilets flush once,
then once again,
then not again for minutes.
The toilets are three feet from the bunk
where her face rests.
The flush will wake her up at night,
and she will see inside you
every time you wipe yourself clean.
There's so much waste.
"Go", I said,
and she did,
over and over through the day
like healthy pregnant women do.
But the smell made her sick
and no food stayed down.
"Nothing for your gratitude journal today,"
she proclaimed,
but I wrote,
are bleeding.
And she wrinkled her nose in disgust
and we laughed,
till she had to vomit again.
The toilet started to flush wildly
that night,
when the water turned back on,
and I was startled off my bunk,
and chipped a tooth.
I cleaned chipped toilets,
and toilets used by fire captains,
and toilets used by life-long hookers,
and almost all of them without gloves
because I was part of the waste.
I was flushed.
I begged for toilet paper,
was strip searched after promising
that my room had none.
The woman in the cell next to me ate hers,
I suspect,
and when the badges stopped giving her any,
I would smuggle the sheets through her door,
and her eyes would fill with tears
of gratitude.
She wasn't a kind person (yet),
but I never believed she was waste, either,
no matter what they said.
You don't flush people,
you flush things.
I flushed a toothpaste tube
full of cocaine,
several dozen apple cores,
and-
on the day they told me
I was a widow-
everything I had written
since those cuffs
first touched my wrists.
To go to his funeral
I stood over one
and peed,
a woman I had met that morning
watching the stream land
in a tiny plastic container.
She taped it up
and wrote my name on it:
WF0124.
What a waste.
All of it bruises,
but only some of it
flushes.
___________________________________________
A glimpse into the types of stories I'll share in the poetry journal of ugly things. This is for the WordPress Blogging University's Day 3 Photo Challenge- Water!
Today I'm grateful for my current toilet.
What are you grateful for?
