Report From Summer Camp, Once There Awaits Serious Work (Song of Prominence Delivered The End of These Laments)

It was awful for everyone there throughout the summer of that year in which I had joined the ranks of the labor encampment, hopeful I would get reimbursement once the contractual term had finished.

Hope was of little use, or soonafter the months were gone, hope would be not just broken even against my calluses for hands. Hope in a place like this here labor encampment will be left scattered and could come only as a smarting shaft of wind blown at the faces to the voices in our ears the longer we worked to the thunder of our strength and weathered ourselves near crying snot and then, blood, the only water to be at the ready for the throats of us morosely hopeful was a few gallon gatorade-drink-dispenser that was refilled with tap water from out the landowner's house, the pastor’s enmity ran our thirst into spartan carapaces of ourselves, careworn beyond living recognition.

The work had been a hardship many of us already agreed on to this job to endure in order to fulfill that nebulous hope each of us had sought to pursue once we had brought ourselves to the end of our situation, working thankless and at all hours of the weeklong interim where we were dropped off and taken back to the work camp a few miles away and closer to paved roads, all of us heaving until the brief day and a half weekend we were allowed each week's completion, having to get up and enter this corrugated bus the pastor's church had lended to our lot.

So seeing as I had worked in these abject conditions across three consecutive months of miserable hard work and had hardly enough sleep for myself to keep stoically adamant in what my labor could provide this land of a man who prayed aloud to a god not to people like us who toiled for a tenuous payment severeance, instead prayed indoors to a congregation who had been attached to souls that were convicted to have even less than a lick of sense that those such as myself, an ugly but not useless woman who was equal as two of the men in what strenuous effort taken by as close to wordless devotion a job like this could reduce some of us here to believe before our term was over and done.

I had suffered that hideous heat that was cooking the skin of those who were placed alongside me, shouldered shovels against swollen armpits against mounds of gathering dirt.

Hour after hours of hard work with little in the way of genuine talk under that stroboscopic sun. It was so hot outdoors that the sky lost all of its color and became a pale greenish-pink boundary ate up from the cloudless dominance of those excruciating afternoons, as if it were another one of us who went out cold and then fainted by weathering us down until near stricken with desperation toward prayer that made us the pastor’s penance.

This godawful heat kept making my spit build under my tongue until it forced it into protruding against my palate mid-click. Whereas my eyes were unreliable as the refreshments available throughout each exhausting day’s completion, both runny and rashy with eczema at the corners where the corneas would wither up and pulsate mucus where there ran no longer any tears among us to spare for a moment’s grief.

Not when sleep was an immaculate if brief interval which would make us always full with trepidation for the present, and look onward to our reward with severity engorged in our mannerism and countenances. We were given lodgings.

It was to become some godawful massive church in Kentucky for all of our undertakings carrying into rudely quiet and sullen as if our souls were taken for ransom at the end of this outing entire. It would be built so it would loom over our efforts and be praiseworthy only by the immaculate flocks of people would otherwise break our workload pathetically into furtive sneers expressing unearthly pity & revulsion paired with insouciant eyes of churchgoerd who all narrowed obliquely and disdainfully at none better than our shirtless forms, rising and lowering bones to the demand of our shadows planted in motion across the property.

The anguish for all the little our hope provided us through it all gave me a digestive parasite embedded and hooked all up inside my intestines, or so my medical check-up showed upon that final week before our payment was tossed to our crooked symmetry of hands and wrists weakened and welded to hang out above our chests destroyed by the smoke either from the petroleum plumes lit by the pastor's displays of ostentatious worship burning every week we digged the earth into networks of trenches, chopped and collapsed forests of the god the pastor was paying us to make room for by force yet made into pious form. Hope burned in our lungs until you would cry a sky of locusts and see oceans of the blood from those not born and who did not belong to us or the pastor or his aisles of beliefs that came for the fires and came to our sides with nothing but spit in their words of gratitude when the smoke from those fires cleared to show our merchandise for hearts working at that blazing site for those three months. Hope was less than a fraction of our lives that year I spent, stupid and in poorest of my mind and my hope swollen in a knotted entanglement of that dirt-colored water we had all drank from out that plastic cylinder-tub of water, replenished only either three days from the last rainfall or, if we drank from our thirst beyond the three days it took the pastor to hose a few gallons out of rubber his house on the property had afforded our labor.

The parasite wormholing itself made me cry for a solid night from delirium once I got sent home following my term's completion. The hope for the money I had earned for that semester was enough to torture myself with the awaited ordeal of living, jobless and without even the rudimentary and infrequent medical care that work encampment provided us independently, at the start and end of our months to complete work for the words of fire and dirt so blasted by cement and steel girders and wooden planks aligned hand by hand into the facades this pastor had paid us enough not for hope, but for us to rectify our weakened forms and return our faith not in the work alone, nor our worship, but with our bones and skin breaking to the shadows that replaced our dolorous motion whether in passing from our hands to the future dispatched, replaced our hearts with not the hope our reward had wrought from our term but instead starved our souls until we were eyeless in the face of how little our departure would support any of us until work of similar intentions and intensity would seek out those of us intrepid enough to work the next contract at the expense of having little left alive once worked near death at the behest of whoever was stationed to ask the work camp to send out there, who came in scores before the scorn of those who would worship at their burial mounds and lap their own songs in the hymns of those who rejoiced in the suffering of the earth and the surrounding people who stood at the word of their Lord’s servant.

It was not our hopes to work this arduous and thankless term on that austere, unforgiving plot of land. It was hope that was not mine nor resembled the hope of any of the men I stood and watched erode alongside my coarse and blanched form, curious after all that crying I did that last week working there that their god must of heard my searing tears and seething in disgust at my heart a child of banishment those beneath the lips and resting words of the pastor and his vestigal following, saw that those sacred fires that were blazing all through those months were enough to cut the fluid and the blood that still clung to my former flesh.

Drawn out of that austerely grassward field of soil and saw our souls were asking for more than the pastor's enmity had attached. Something in that land was called from that striated foundation for him to build upon long after our hands were done and dealt dollars that hope could only be eligible in either the lottery or in between the shadows the dead amount among us working to tears, drinking our sorrow behind the details I and many other had been stupid enough to go on and put in the time as though our hopes swam without the enormous drought that would surround us in that heat.

Some elongated lifeform, devised by their god to recognize my cry of bleak respite had afforded me in that final week, as though it saw through my despondence and sank in that shared tank of water we all drank, then ran up on my last gulf of mouth engorged by wanting, teeth and breath panting and eyesight pounding.

I came back from that three months with enough to buy myself into another habit of earthen delight that I could grab and soak those terrible hopes until that day of judgement, what I was crying in powerless astonishment would be swallowed in the hole of laughter I would elect to build inside my infested self, and then in inelegant fashion, one day burst with the awaited drawing of death that would in all hopes starve the pestilence eating at my insides.

Hope everything goes out to the work waste and water will make of small amounts of shadow and motion until blood is the aspect of the light flooding the dark of flames that will be the first to prosperity from the cindered events sought by the words that they will flood into food for the morning or perpetual night-swarm that will follow the same hopes for those people like myself, lines forming their lesser woes and find them in worship of the soil and the wrathful visitors that are fetched from the earth and are pinioned to the lament of our bones between the zones of allowing work to be completed, undone in eyeless scrutiny, burning skin shown to the rest of hopes a resident amid the scalloped clouds to a bulemic sky's esophageal downfall.

It was an awful summer, and to have the last question on your mind answered, I slept around well but barely concealed my mind that year and years hereafter without clutching at the tumid outline that three month payment severance had earned.

I ate the same water that left my eyesight that day I started crying from having not a lick of sense left in my stupid head once it was almost finished and I never had encountered work good enough to make this fate meet up with the closed, encroaching date where the parasite eating at myriad cords that I clung to and took vain hope in that pain, emptying my heart and mind to nourish something that I drank and let swim in my fears and then my eyes until it came and decided that my throat would be the trough of not song, but the suspension of my work and my word to be the food of the earth and my growth will become my first belief, having as it made residency in the truth of my way to escape from the heart no longer motion, black and soft from those memories of flame that wiped off the woods and put in the length of our shadows outlasted to our chests and eyes all to be the end of our journey that was the way to the end of my hopes, and the beginning of this existence where I will not rest until I leave in full peace when the parasite drowns in the bliss of having found a foothold at this: a temple the pastor would have chastised me as the same as the work for his word and our weaknesses will become our holiness once removed from our woes.

-Dec. 30th, 2025