1. Going through the Gate at Two Rivers

Inside the outside world there’s another,
and the way in is all steel and buzzer
having to do with your ID and whether
you’ve done crime to do time, but
if you’re clean you go right in
to sit with inmates whose luck
divided them from you until
right now in this circle of trust
where love belongs to all of us
equally for two thousand breaths
in an afternoon. Too soon you
go back through to the bright
outside leaving your brothers
inside, inside your mind, with
you in all you do until next time
you pass through the gate to them.

~ Kim Stafford

2. Women Going Through the Gate at Columbia River

2. Women Going Through the Gate at Columbia River “Dress for the job you want!” is a motivational pitch that falls flat in prison. If you’re an adult in custody (AIC) in Oregon, you wear the blue clothes you’re allotted, even if they don’t fit. Female AICs wore men’s jean sizes until 2023. Mark Twain pointed out, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” He did not remark on how often clothes unmake the woman. Inside and outside prisons, women–more than men–are judged by what we wear. Of the itemized rules in the Oregon Administrative Rules governing visitor clothing (OAR 291-127-0460) eleven of the sixteen detailed articles are aimed at women, although the prohibition of wraparound skirts may affect some men. AICs, if they’re male, can wear thermal shirts under tee shirts when it’s cold. Female AICs cannot. In a women’s prison a thermal shirt is underwear, and whether you’re an AIC or a visitor, underwear must be worn without showing.

But what does underwear have to do with poets laureate and quantum gates? Why am I writing about rules for visitors to prisons and rules for prisoners in the same paragraph? Kim Stafford wrote a true and delightful poem about the world inside a prison, which is also inside us. He didn’t write about gender, but the gendered nature of these worlds matters, even if you’re a poet laureate. Being a woman exacerbates the unusual “logic” of who goes in or out of prisons, and, like in quantum mechanics, the gates are reversible. Bra-ket notation is part of the mathematical language that describes quantum gates. This story is about a hidden world, like the quantum one, where something unseen created a spectacle. The current poet laureate of Oregon, Ellen Waterston, and I recently played unintentional roles.

I blame myself for underemphasizing the detailed restrictions on visitor clothing for women. To me, “provocative clothing” sounds like a Monty Python sketch: “Madam, make your blouse stop provoking me or I shall report you!” But there is nothing funny about the prohibition on provocative clothing in prisons. Women are denied visitation with sons and husbands if an officer deems their clothing provocative. Before Ellen and I got in trouble, I hadn’t considered the dangers of women’s clothing, and I’m not sure wraparound skirts and underwire bras would register as a threat to me, even if I did. When a colleague suggested inviting Ellen to lead a poetry workshop for a Thursday afternoon writing class, it sounded like a perfect way to avoid making a lesson plan. Ellen had taught in Oregon prisons before. She was familiar with the “no blue” rule for visitors. I failed to tell her that restrictions on women’s clothes are more extensive than that.

We buzzed in at Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) forty minutes early so that we would have plenty of time to set up the room. Ellen’s Visitor Authorization was in order. She traded her driver’s license for the Visitor’s badge, and I swiped in. So far so good. An alarm light flashed when she went through the metal detector, so I held her earrings and watch, and she tried again. The light flashed again. When an officer asked, “Are you wearing an underwire bra?” my heart sank. I forgot to tell Ellen, “No underwires.” Fortunately, she was also wearing a full camisole bra over it, which she’d thought of just in case officers thought her cotton blouse was too sheer! Yay! She suggested to the officer that she’d use the washroom to change the offending bra to the camisole bra, but the answer came fast, from a female officer: no camisoles. The officer explained, with great seriousness, that ODOC does not consider a camisole bra a bra, and a female visitor must wear a bra. Her calm voice revealed pleasure in this explanation. She was in charge. I’d never heard an officer say “bra” so many times in one sentence. I later looked up the regulation and found the grammar so garbled that it appears that male visitors must also wear bras: “…(2) All visitors are required to wear:(a) Undergarments, including non-underwire bras, must not be visible through outer clothing; and (b) Footwear.”

At first Ellen wanted to reason with the officer. Her furrowed brow showed that she was upset by the absence of logic. “But my camisole is a bra,” she insisted. I gently took her by the elbow and guided her away. I whispered in her ear, “Don’t argue! We won’t find a way to go in if you try to be rational.” I had seen this before. Ellen and I needed to remain cheerful and make a plan. I asked another officer, “Do you happen to know what’s the nearest store that might sell a bra?” He replied, “Target. Jantzen Beach.”

With fewer than fifteen minutes until class, we turned in Ellen’s Visitor’s Badge and headed to the Jantzen Beach Target, where we were in and out in a flash, with a new bra for Ellen. She changed in the car on the way back. I suppose she used the “changing clothes under your clothes” method, but I didn’t see it because I focused on driving as defensively as the law permits. Ellen had no qualms. We had the solidarity of a team overcoming an obstacle.

The men in the writing class had been waiting for us for ten minutes by the time we got to the room. We were lucky they’d been allowed to wait. While Ellen unloaded her bag of poetry books, she explained exactly what happened, and everyone laughed and nodded. Then everyone got down to work crafting responses to a series of writing prompts, “I notice,” “I remember,” and “I wonder.”

As we went back out the gates to “the bright outside” referenced in Kim Stafford’s poem, we talked about the writers in our class, how they and their words stayed with us. While I drove Ellen to prep for her next gig we talked about the unity, the humanity we had experienced. “We all have a common heart language,” Ellen said. “That was evident in what was written and read aloud today. What an honor it was to work with each of these fine writers.”

~TJ Jaffe