These poems are part of the special section, New Poems of U.S. History, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence selected by editors Carolivia Herron, Summer Tate, and Robert Bettmann. You can read more about the section on the Day Eight website here.

Aspiration Pneumonia, 1971

A History and Sociology of Willowbrook State School

The kitchen grinds the food to prevent choking:
Vegetable slush, stale bread soaked in sour milk.

So few attendants, three minutes per child.

The ablest grab from the nearest plate, the less
dexterous dump the plate, lap from the floor.

The least capable crowd the aide,
jostle for a turn from the shared bowl.

With a big spoon we ladle it into their mouths,
from the last back to the first again.

A boy gulps all he can from the spoon, eats
and breathes at once, food lodges in his lungs.

So few attendants, three minutes per child.

The nurse takes a breath each time she must
place the call, three or four times a month:

“Your son has expired,” she tells our mother.
As if he were a loaf of bread, a jug of milk.

Fifty Years After Willowbrook

“Now we have small Willowbrooks.” Ida Rios, Willowbrook parent

1. Purple bruises on her breasts and buttocks, a shoe print on her belly

After Jane Kurtin, Geraldo Rivera, the Staten Island Advance, ABC news
After the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Aid Society, the class-action lawsuit
After the consent decree, the “Constitutional right to protection from harm”
After children were transferred to group homes throughout New York
After Willowbrook closed for good in 1987
After the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act
After promising 6,000 alumni “high-quality services for the rest of their lives”
After placing Willowbrook survivors at the Union Avenue home in the Bronx
After advocates formed a Consumer Advisory Board to hear grievances
After understaffing and undertraining and inadequate oversight
After assembly-line showers, restraints, seclusion, denial of food
After visitors wondered about suspicious bruises
After whistleblowers at Union Avenue warned family members of abuse
After hair-pulling and slapping and spitting
After black eyes, burns, cuts, stitches, sexual assault
After a federal civil rights lawsuit. After a $6 million settlement
After the state declined to bring criminal charges
After state employees were not fired, but transferred to other group homes

Kristin W. Davis (kristinwdavis.com) lives in Washington, DC, and holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast. Her writing has appeared in the Southern Review, Nimrod, Los Angeles Review, Arts and Letters, on Maine Public radio and elsewhere. Her poetry has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poets and has earned the International Human Rights Arts Festival’s Creators of Justice Award. Her work includes a collection of poems centered on Willowbrook, at one time the largest institution in the world for people with intellectual and other disabilities. The exposure of human rights abuses at Willowbrook and the activism that shut it down were driving forces behind this country’s disability rights movement that led to the Americans With Disabilities Act and other civil rights legislation.

Featured image Scan by NYPL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons