On Confinement

I sit across the table from my partner in the atrium of the psychiatric holding facility our hands churched into our laps. We are not allowed to touch. The air between us thick as Perspex. They tell me all the ways this place resembles a prison. • Everything a sterile white so clean it could almost disinfect a memory. • In 1787, Jeremy Bentham conceived of what would become the most common prison design: the panopticon. Intended to control prisoners through the illusion that they are always under surveillance. • My partner tells their therapist they are afraid of taking their own life, that they balanced on a building’s edge, & three officers escort them from the room. • The first cop who ever handcuffed me [was my father] left me bound till my fingers blued. On the days when I can’t remember his face, he becomes the scent of vodka & zip ties the sound of cuffs & a bottle petaling into blades. • At the booking office they remove my glasses & the guards blur into a procession of fathers. • I bring my partner clothes & pads when the hospital decides to hold them longer, shove each shirt that could mark them as queer back inside the closet & shut it [like a mouth]. • The word faggot scrawls across the jail guard’s lips like graffiti. • When I visit my partner they insist on staying inside the sky above the patio cordoned off  with chicken wire. • I plead my sentence down in exchange for: my face, my prints, my DNA & ten years probation. When I see a cop, I fear even my breath criminal & when my therapist asks me if  I’m suicidal I lie. Perhaps both are a kind of  surveillance. • Tear gas floods the street, sharpens water to a blade hidden in the orbit of my eye. & just like this, a squad car remakes my sadness a weapon. If my partner snaps cuffs around my wrists [& I asked for this] have they also weaponized my desire? • A woman in the facility tells my partner: I know what you are. Says: Sinner. Says: Anti-christ. My partner goads her on, babbles in false tongues & is confined to their room for safety. • Once, a cop dragged me into an alley & beat me like he knew exactly what I was. What does it say if sometimes when I ask my partner to hit me I expect his fist tightened in their throat, his voice bruising their tongue? • I am arrested & placed [in the men’s jail] in solitary confinement. They tell me this is protective custody. That they couldn’t afford the lawsuit if  I were killed. In this way, they tell me I am a woman only when I am no longer breathing. • The origin of the word prison is the Latin prehendere— to take. It follows, then, that to take your life is to prison the body beneath dirt. • [Historically, suicide is a criminal act]. • Balanced on a building’s edge, I imagine some permutation of  this moment where to fail at death would be a breach of my probation. • We both weep for the first time upon release when we see the sky. Pale blue sliced through with a single helix of razor wire & bordered in sterile white.