Jim Thorpe was an American Hero

I found a box and inside

were postcards from Europe

and a few stray pictures of

vacations that I just remember.

There I was in polka dotted bikinis  flailing floaties,

in front of Ferris wheels, behind ice cream

cones (oh, repetitious summer).

I found a stray from

a small Irish town named after

a football player up north

near Lehighton.

In the snapshot , there was a prison

on a hill; the name, I forget,

but I remember trembling

as we climbed up the steep walkway

and through the gates.

The prison was no longer active,

a same-as-the-day-it-was-built
tourist attraction, but
neither then nor now could I understand

penitentiary tours.

 It looked something

like a castle, all gray and towering.

I wondered what types of people were

held there, but I contented myself

with thoughts of kings and queens

and royal house parties to soothe
the chill on my neck.

The tour guide dressed in

street clothes (no uniform for aesthetics sake)

showed us some silvered cells

with the cots unmade and cigarette

butts stubbed into the floor. He repeated

some folks believed the prison was

haunted, as he moved us to the next cell

with a scarecrow fixed on the bed and

two hand prints on the wall. He said,

"This gentleman here (I wanted to

shout out that the scarecrow wasn't

real) was an innocent man," and he

pointed to the hand prints on the wall.

"He said, right before he was hung,

he would leave his mark on this place

if he was truly innocent. Sure enough he did."

They demonstrated the legacy

by applying paint over the hand prints;
they did not disappear behind

each green stroke.

Sure enough, I backed away.

We visited the women's

pink showering quarters.
It was dead bugs and rust,
soap rings and empty bottles.

“Charming,” the guide sneered.

After more storytelling and

stairwells chained off, the

tour guide said he was going to

show us the dungeons.

He actually called them the dungeons

and what we saw were dungeons,

a basement filled with dark

tunnels without any bars and

man-made holes in the ground.

There was no light or window in any of those

rooms, just the flickering of the

 60-watt light bulb in the hallway center.

I imagined men like lions

roaring from the inside, tortured

and when I stared hard enough into

one of those holes, I swore I saw eyes blink back.

We went home that night and I couldn't shake the shivers.
Grandmom was sleeping in my bed;

she said Baby Jesus will take away my fears.

I’d never used prayer for comfort,

reliant always on guilt and want,

but the words meant nothing more beyond memorization

and the tunnels were now part of me.

In another life, I have been a basement.

In another time, I have been brighter.

Every year we go back to see the St. Patrick's

Day parade and the changing of the leaves.

On the hill, a white figure hangs from a rope
next to a sign that says

"Happy Halloween."