“Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center,” by Victoria Korth (Poetry ’18)

Alumna Victoria Korth recently won the Montreal International Poetry Prize for her poem “Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center.” Read an excerpt below:

Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center

One needs to be a little lost to find it
on a Dutchess County knoll. Building 85
still stands. Look it up. Or better, go yourself.
Its lower story windows broken, boarded,
but the other thirteen floors appear intact enough 
to taunt the empty village outside its gates 
with State employment. Our lives, that “campus” 
and my journeying, have crossed: first as a child, 
and later as a doctor who made some kinds of work done there 
my habit, my profession, and today, when heading home 
from Danbury in the snow, with no one quite expecting me.
I turned off at Wingdale, followed ditches lined with cow vetch 
dropping on the downside of a sudden rise. There: 
bakery, laundry, low-slung dorms, brick housing 
for unlicensed pharmacists, a minor stadium, and, hidden 
in the trees, burial ground with rotting gate and lettered arch—
patients abandoned to the place—every inch dissolving, 
stripped of flashing, grizzling with mineral ooze. 

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.montrealpoetryprize.com/2020-competition-1