soap

a found poem

prohibited
from having writing
materials she
[wrote] poems

by carving
them into a bar
of soap

with
a
burned
match-
stick

she read it again
and again until
she memorized it

then

she'd wash her hands
and the poem
would be gone

Found in Sy Safransky's "The Full Catastrophe" in a back issue of The Sun which my aunt tucked in to my bag as I was leaving her home, saying: "you need to make room for one more magazine."

"She" is the dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the 1980s. She wrote and remembered 250 poems during her captivity in this way.

Her story reminded me of an artifact I saw a long time ago in the Resistance Museum in Oslo: a diary written on sheets of toilet tissue with a straight pin -- each letter formed by a succession of pin pricks -- by a gentleman who was imprisoned for resisting the Nazi occupation of Norway. He tucked his diary away -- under the floorboards, I think -- and it survived his imprisonment, although he did not.