By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page moves from disorientation in a putrid hallway into a blunt account of racialized ship labor and forced inspection.
What gives the page force is the way bodily memory and labor violence sit in the same breath. The speaker's own passage through redness and confusion does not lead inward; it turns immediately outward toward the captain, the mate, and the degrading work imposed on others.
A brief hinge page that splits cleanly in two. The first movement is bodily and dazed: having 'made chambers out of the hallway,' the narrator comes to 'on the tile floor' in 'a putrid redness / that is not easy to remember.' The second movement swings outward to the ship's machinery of power, 'the Captain and his Mate / Manipulated the blacks' to scrape 'that dung / Before they dared their Cidney run / into inspection.' Private disorientation and the official cover-up before inspection are set side by side, the speaker's own delirium leading straight into someone else's forced labor.