“Heaven’s door is open to us
like a big vacuum cleaner

O help
O clouds of dust
O choir of hairpins”

Published in 1975 by Kornblee Gallery with funding from poet James Merrill, Slave Days features twenty-nine poems by Hill paired with thirty-one photocopier prints she made of small domestic objects—a cookie cutter, a hairbrush, a wishbone, a toy frog, etc. On the cover is an image of an earring that can be read as a ball and chain. Slave Days is the first of Hill’s many ventures into the publication of her photocopies through offset reproduction