Death by Laundry

This is one of the poems I published in Whispers, Shouts, and Songs.

Basically, this poem came to be after I had dealt with one too many loads of incomplete laundry.  I’ve never really liked doing laundry. I actually do pretty well until I have to put things away (I actually had no dressers in my last house). And socks? I hardly wear socks–I wear shoes that don’t require them, or I wear tights. My husband, on the other hand, wear socks EVERY day. This was one of those post-marriage revelations…and something to which I did not easily become accustomed. I hate washing, drying, and matching socks (Me to my husband: “Clip your socks!”) And one day…it was enough, and this poem came out…and I worked on it bit by bit, refining it over several weeks before it got to this point.  I, for the record, feel completely ridiculous having written a poem about laundry. But then I remember Walt Whitman…who reveled in the every day, finding it, more than anything, worthy of poetry, and so here I am.

I actually never finished this one, but it was as finished as it was going to get (again, my notebook holds many drafts of this), so I went with it.  I feel, though, like this is one I will still come back to…

Death by Laundry

I cower before an accumulation of apparel,

a perilous pyramid perched precariously upon the edge of my bed—

barring me from rest.

The scent of Downey fills the air.

I should go in for the tackle…but, no…

The long tentacles of cool weather T-shirts, tangling together, threaten to topple the pile when I tug just one.

Jenga, it is.

I regroup: “Start small!”

But the trickster tube socks taunt me:

Mixing, never matching, posing like twins but morphing into distant cousins when I finally draw them out from their game of hide and seek.

I am a failed matchmaker—

I dive in again but am smothered by sweaters, weighed down by denim, strangled by slacks…

Cause of death: Asphyxiation…