You see, the community that women keep is connective tissue

         Oh honey, dontchu worry, my first time I stole a bathroom key on accident

One of them teaches me how to load funds onto the plain white credit card

That I will use to buy my brother lunch from a vending machine

Another teaches me how to work the lockers where we stash coats and car keys

I’ve never felt more like a woman than I did when the correctional officer told me

         We can’t let you in with that giant hole in your jeans.

For those of us who refuse to change, they have hospital gowns to cover our shame

So I don the surgeon's smock, neck to wrists to mid-shin covered in clinical blue plastic paper

Pressing C5 for a chicken sandwich in my Amish bridal gown

I toss minuscule smiles at the other women gathering food

They too shuffle around, unwrapping Three Musketeers or hot chips

Trying for decent presentation on tiny paper plates delivered to one of twenty tables

Numbered with masking tape, where the inmates can only sit and wait

I’ve never felt more like a woman than I did serving a microwaved

Dinner to someone who used to throw dirtballs at me as a kid

In the corner of the room hangs a pixelated photo of a garden

The men dressed in faded navy stand in front of it with their visitors for a picture together

When it's time to leave, I hold the door for an older lady behind me.

Her clothes were proper but informal, a kind of calculated casual that some of us adopt to pass unnoticed in institutional spaces.

She stared the September sunset in the face and said:

         What a beautiful day. It is.

I always feel like a woman when I’m crying on my steering wheel.