The American Dream Fooled Me

Eric Boyd
5 min readMar 25, 2020
Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

I feel like I am experiencing life without my body for the first time, and it scares me. In jail, my job was to collect trash, run errands, and scrap copper wire for the county to get a little guard food every night; when I was released I sold my plasma for nearly ten years; I was a dishwasher and a line cook; I worked for a caterer and, while carrying a full hand-truck of kitchen equipment up a small set of steps, got some pretty…

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Eric Boyd

Work in Joyland, Guernica, and The Offing. Winner of a PEN Prison Writing Award. Working on a novel. // linktr.ee/ericboyd