PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Paola Corso

PoetryMagazine.com

Paola Corso
Page 3

Step by Step with the Laundress

1. It’s easier to wash clean clothes if wearing clean clothes,
a saying adapted from your college-educated uncle who says it’s
easier to find a job if you have a job when he hears you chewed
out Stubby for cutting back your hours at Eat’n Park.

2. Sort clothes in neat piles on the basement floor beside the safe
where your father Mister Twenty Horns stashes company photos
from mill picnics and prayer cards for every deceased member
of the family, alphabetized by saint.

3. Check pockets for matches, lighters, cigarettes left from break,
a string of beads Unc bought for job interviews but you wore
to bar bingo and stuffed in a pocket because it felt like bugs
around your neck.

4. Load the washer, set the dial, and pour in double the detergent,
knowing old man Twenty Horns waters it down since you told him
to either stop buying the cheap-ass Giant Eagle brand or you’d quit
doing his laundry.

5. As soon as the clothes are submerged in soapy water, have a
cigarette and listen to Tom Jones until the line “Whoa, whoa,
whoa, she’s a lady” or your butt burns out. Whichever comes first.

6. When the load begins to agitate, drink your coffee on the porch
beside your grandmother’s scrub board and hand wringer that
Twenty Horns will make you use if his water bill gets any higher
from trying to get mill soot out of his work clothes and the soup
of the day off yours.

7. Hang a taut line. Keep a clothespin in your mouth as if
smoking a cigarette while your work friend Donna finishes
your hoagie because her daughter ate hers and you gave yours
up for adoption.

8. Group clothes and hang together except don’t put your
36 D hooter holders next to Donna’s 32 AAA because you
know who will figure out you’ve been washing her clothes
since she got fired and kick your ass all the way to a laundromat.

9. Have a cigarette on the porch while the clothes dry. Then check
on your dying uncle next door as soon as your father stops yelling
about you getting another pay cut at Eat’n Park, so you’ll never get
the hell out of his house.

10. Get rid of the wasp nest near the line because Twenty Horns
is too cheap to hire an exterminator and says you’ll blow them away
with your smoker’s cough. Tell him smoking like a chimney
ain't as bad as him smoking what a stack at the mill belches out so
he’ll get the cancer, not you.

11. Take clothes down from the line, then see if you can go offer
to change your uncle’s pillowcase next door because it’s moist
from his shallow breath and you suddenly need him to see you
wearing the beads he gave you, if he remembers why.

12. Fold the clothes. Out of respect for your uncle, plan to wear
a clean uniform from the basket if you need to visit the funeral home
someday soon, then go straight to work rather than call in sick.
You want to believe what he told you.

-Paola Corso, The Laundress Catches Her Breath

(CavanKerry Press, 2012)

A Well-Ventilated Basement Apartment

She flashes a charge card and her middle finger then leaves her father’s house to move into her own apartment during a flash flood while her uncle puts on a pair of boots and shines a flashlight in the closet. There he finds a crate—inside it are some old pay stubs and a card she never gave him, the words written in the controlled cursive she hasn’t used since Catholic school. She wades to an open window, takes a breath deep enough to air out her past, to exhale the ghost inside her.

-Paola Corso, The Laundress Catches Her Breath

(CavanKerry Press, 2012)