Four laundromat sonnets
You talking to me? I say in my head, channeling a Travis-Bickle-
without-the-gun attitude, trying it on like clothes you don’t have
to wash because it’s always raining. There’s no one else here
so that man must be talking to the dryers: Doin’ ok? About done?
Someone I loved yelled when I let his clean underwear fall
onto the unswept floor. Someone else I loved advised never
to mix cottons with synthetics because the sky would fall,
the silken sky inside her that could only be washed by hand
with other blues, those my brother sang to himself when no one
else was listening. Who wears a heart on their sleeve anymore?
Who calls us onto the carpet? Among several patron saints
of laundry only Veronica is famous, having wiped the bloody
sweaty face of Jesus & kept the cloth unlaundered, beseeching
the red blots, greasy lines & smudges not to fade away with time.
*
Today’s news: Raquel Welch grew old like the rest of us
& has died. Raquel of the high cheekbones & animal
skin bikini, Raquel Welch, Va-Va-Voom—imagine a tuxedo’d
male comedian tracing a curvy, vase-like shape in the air—
Raquel Welch whose cleavage enthralled & embarrassed me
watching her as Constance in The Three Musketeers.
The movie’s nuns & laundresses, flat & gray as school uniforms,
mop water, the cleaning never done. I never quite filled out
the training bra worn under my brother’s hand-me-down shirts.
Raquel, did you really haunt my coming of age, or was it
the lives of the saints, the leftover air of centuries we breathed
when Monsignor Prudell walked straight & tall down the hall
of our school, something like a sour mist bred along rivers
where women had beaten & scrubbed the underclothes, linens, rags.
*
I’ll call her Mary, the woman untangling yarn while her wash
tumbles & spins. Wearing the $10 sheepskin coat she found
at the new St. Vinnie’s in North Eugene she unwinds, rewinds
& chats, spinning bright suns of conversation in the dreary
fluorescent atmosphere for anyone patient enough to listen.
Dear Mary, I’m not patient & the first-grade-teacher lilt
of your voice makes me think of sunflowers wilting,
the world rarely as earnest as our crayons once made it.
Please take the yellow highlighter & the number 2 pencil
I use to underline old hurts, & since I’m feeling generous
take these old hearts too, the one that shrank in the dryer
& the moldy one I left too long in the hamper, thumping,
bleating for weeks. Who is this drab woman staring at me
from the washer’s porthole? Color her! Color her purple & orange.
*
Whoever heard of Hunna, another patron saint of laundry
& laundry workers; in 7th century Strasbourg she was famous,
a woman of means who bathed the less fortunate & washed
their clothes down by the Ill River, holy housekeeper, her son
later canonized too. Little else is known about her, as little
will be known about most of us after Atropos snips the thread—
dear reader, my thread is frayed, years of not saying, not
praying, each day’s birth pangs, soiled linen, little rips and tears.
Here, take the heart I keep mostly hidden, its hungers,
its worries, beating 1200 times a minute, & the hummingbird
voice that goes with it, a loose, rusty wheel, hardly used
or used in unfortunate ways. This necessary business
of laundry, treating the most stubborn stains then tossing
the darks in with the lights, everything washed in forgiving cold.
Sara Burant lives with her dog Penn in Eugene, Oregon. Her poems, collaborative translations of Paul Éluard’s poetry, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Canary, One Art, periodicities, Quartet Journal, and The Denver Quarterly, among other publications. Her work has been honored with a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts and a residency at Playa. She’s the author of a chapbook, Verge.
