Charles Rammelkamp

TOTAL IMMERSION

Officer Nichols gave Betsy the option:
“If you let me baptize you,
I’ll let you go with a citation.”
He’d found marijuana in her car
when he stopped her for running a redlight.
Nichols told her God was talking to him.

Betsy didn’t want to go to jail.
She followed Nichols out to Duck Lake,
Nichols calling another cop, Ron Hayes,
to record the dunking on his cellphone,
Betsy’s wet t-shirt molding her breasts.

Later, Betsy sued.
“He touched my crotch
when he handcuffed me,” she claimed,
Nichols indicted on several dozen counts,
including rape, assault, official oppression.

That was in 2019,
the case repeatedly postponed,
because of the pandemic.
Now Betsy’s been found dead in her home,
a healthy 42-year-old woman,
the cause of her death unclear.


Charles's YouTube video reading of "Total Immersion":



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Charles confesses: "Where else but America? When I read about the Tennessee police officer coercing the woman he’d arrested into a “baptism” – which resembled a sexual assault more than a purification rite – and then about her mysterious death when she pressed charges, I was horrified at the same time that the incident sounded so familiar. The policeman has been involved in almost four dozen lawsuits including rape and “official oppression.” I did not read that he had been fired or suspended or even slapped on the wrist."

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP's latest poetry collection, The Field of Happiness, has just been published by Kelsay Books. Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books. He contributes a monthly book review to North of Oxford and is a frequent reviewer for The Lake, London Grip, and The Compulsive Reader.