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| by Elizabeth Weitz |
The poem If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking by Emily Dickinson kept running through my head throughout this particular episode of Orange Is the New Black like a protective mantra for the characters. I knew that repeating these lines wouldn't do anything, after-all it's just a television show and I am not stupid, but there was something about it that sparked my involuntary poetry Tourette Syndrome, an interesting ailment that I used to suffer from when I was a kid and things would start to break apart. I thought that if only I could get all the lines from a poem out fast enough, then, perhaps the center might indeed hold (to mangle Yeats) and somehow I would be protected.
As a kid, this seemed possible.
As an adult I know differently.
And in Litchfield prison the allegory that runs quietly beneath the lives of the guards and prisoners is one of constant breaking; be it body, soul, mind or, in the literal sense, physical.
