Category: Guest Authors

You know the beginning of certain
dreams by the signals they send—
Chime ringing behind one door
at the end of a long hallway
from “Found” by Luisa A. Igloria

A different year, a different state,
a different bar…this one called
Suds, and open early, from 8 AM

to midnight six days, and 1 PM
to 10 on Sunday. It occupied one
end of an old strip-mall, really
two business locations: the watering-

hole on the corner, and an adjoining
washeteria, one with no apparent entry.
My first visit was an accident, or rather,

just to ask to use their phone to call
one in, a fender-bender on the corner
I’d just passed (no one hurt, but both
the drivers asked me please to stop

somewhere and ring the police). No cell
phones then, but payphones in transition:
some a quarter, but sometimes still

a dime. When I stepped in, first thing
I heard was a chime, followed by
the proprietor (in a formal voice
befitting any maître-d’) announcing:

Number Four. Your laundry is ready.
I thought I’d misheard, but followed
the young woman who’d stood up from

a wood table on which sat a small
red pyramid emblazoned with a 4. She
broke off the conversation she was
having with a friend and headed

toward the back, around the corner
of the bar and through a door into
a sort of airlock with two phones,

one-dollar-or-five-dollars change
machine, and three adjoining entries:
Ladies, Gents, and Laundry. I rang
the police as promised, then explored…

Behind door three, sixteen machines,
eight each to wash and dry, each with
a painted number beside the coin-feeder.

Above the rows, a CCTV camera panned
slowly back and forth above the status-
of-operation lights, and as dryer number
five was winding down to come in for

a landing, again the chime and maître-d’
announcing: Number Five. Your laundry.
I fell in love. It was such a practical,

delightful way of doing. I stepped back
through the airlock, sat at the bar and asked
if I could maybe get a coffee. While
the barkeep poured, he kept an eye

on a little screen beside the register.
Then he came over, said: All clear till
Number One is dry. Your first time here?

We got to chatting casually, he said he
was the owner actually, and had a couple
other barkeeps who’d come in now and then
to spell him, but mostly he was there.

We were interrupted for two Michelob,
another shot of Dewar’s, and a double
shot of fabric softener in a paper cup.

The bar was slightly damp, my coffee mug
had slipped a bit. He toweled it up, gave
me a cardboard coaster, one with a picture
of a painting: Degas. A Woman Ironing.

(The closing coaster is a nod to Neil Creighton’s poem “Ironer.” See the previous poems in the series here, here and here.)

(continuation of a series which began with “Because I Sort of Knew Him” and “What’s In a Name“)

but I have been alone
here at the present
infinite spot
from “Sitting Place” by Dave Bonta

There was another brother
I’d met at that same bar, who some
years later, turned out to be
the hillside neighbor
of the man I said I’d marry.

We shall leave the brother nameless
(in keeping with our policy
of anonymity, but if you need
a form or frame of reference, think
of him as Snoopy’s brother Spike.)

I was kneeling on last year’s Yellow
Pages (my way of recycling) in front
of a Coleman cooler whose hinges had
gone bad. I was pulling out clean jeans
and wringing out the blue-gray water.

He came wandering over the hill
and leaned on my truck and watched
me. I kept wringing. (He was the one
come visiting, not me, so I kept on
doing until he got around to speaking.)

A man in the desert’s a good thing
he said. A man and his dog
in the desert. Add a woman
and a clothesline and it gets different.
Then you have a g-ddammed homestead.

I finished wringing, stood up and took
my basket over to the tow-rope I’d
strung up between the trailer
awning and the bumper of my truck,
began to pin wet jeans and shirts up

on the slippery divide between that
untamed frontier and civilized.

(sequel to “Because I Sort of Knew Him“)

He kept his chin up
no matter what, weathering
all weather.
from “Crushed” by Dave Bonta

When I am working, sometimes
there’s tension and frustration,
sometimes supervisors or
customers will shout at the shirt,
call its name out with a string
of expletives.

Inside the shirt, I am safely
anonymous, and protected.
No one ever actually gets
to shout at me.

***

When I am working, sometimes
it’s tedious and repetitive,
nothing to hold my interest, so
I pretend I am a spy working
undercover.

Within my cover identity,
I then become attentive to every
thing and every one around me,
and as I occupy my mind
with this, the mindless work
gets done.

***

When I am working, sometimes
it is challenging, feels perhaps
a bit beyond me, overwhelming,
and I feel uncertain, hesitant.

But then I remember that I am
a superhero, and already in
my costume, my hero-name
clearly visible right there
on my lapel, and then I can
tap right in to the superpower
secrets and proceed
with confidence.

***

Make no mistake: I DO go
to the laundromat, and wash
my boxers, socks, and jeans.

Shirt-selections from St. Vincent’s
are more about some other things
(and a bit about not ironing).

I took the lift even though I wasn’t
really hitching, and the walk was four miles
only, and the bags I carried were not heavy…

but I accepted when he pulled over
to the corner where I was waiting
for a light to change because I sort of knew

him, had exchanged nods and light conversation
at the bar where I would go some evenings
to sip a cup of coffee slowly, letting

echoes of a day of au pair service, echoes
of children’s squeals and tribulations
seep out of my mind, surround myself

with other adults quietly unwinding themselves
in the dimmer light, transitioning from day-
work to head-home-at-night identities.

I knew where he was going, and when he’d
seen my baggage, he’d assumed (correctly)
I was headed for St. Vincent’s goodwill thrift

to drop off a sack of clothing being donated
by the parents of my charges. And he, whose name
I never really knew exactly, was going there

to do his version of the laundry: every
weekend, he’d go to the rack of heavy cotton
shirts from uniforms, brown and gray and olive

green, small medium large XL 2X, dark blue
and khaki, short-sleeved shirts with buttons,
each emblazoned with someone’s first name.

Each week he’d drop off seven shirts in
the donation bin, carefully select a crisply
ironed long-sleeved white (from which I surmised

he either went on a date on Saturday night,
or church on Sunday morning); one plain solid
color t-shirt for daytime-wear on Saturday;

and five work-shirts, each with a different
identity stitched on directly over the heart.

Written in response to Dave Bonta’s “Une Semaine de Bonté” and Luisa A. Igloria’s “Refurbished.”