Some say the name’s from the Aramaic, “a field of blood,” and others 
say potters were wanderers, vagrants, rootless ones, the dispossessed 
and friendless.

There are videos of crews in white hazmat suits, digging 
furrows for coffins. Three deep, row after row. Bodies in white 
boxes that will mix with still-born remains, with bones 
of the poor who died from yellow fever and Spanish flu. With 
AIDS victims who may have walked past me on New York streets 
in bodies flush with possibility. Now they mingle in brown 
dirt claimed by tree roots and beetles and mindless foraging ants. 

And as for the island that holds this Potters Field? It’s named Hart 
Island. Not named “heart,” for the organ beating beneath the ribs 
but “hart,” a name for a male deer. A name for an island shaped 
like a deer leg. A flattened haunch ending in a solitary spit, 
reminiscent of a black cloven hoof that can bear a body 
as it walks. 

AILEEN BASSIS is a widely exhibited visual artist and poet in New York City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. She was awarded two artist residencies in poetry to the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart prizes and two poems appear in anthologies on the subject of migration. Her journal publications include B o d y Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, The Pinch and Prelude. aileenbassis.com, Instagram: aileenbassisnyc