Heiress to the Laundromat
I come after school to refill the detergent
boxes of bright red and blue and gold painted
like the long candy aisles. I love to watch
the coins rush from the trays like silver
minnows that I try to catch in my fists.
In the evenings my mother steadies
the washing machine while my father
looks inside its hard belly that eats his
face until it goes quiet. He pulls out the long
metal insides, he squeezes and screws as if a baby
was coming out soon. The Mexican
woman with the dark, heavy blankets
she’s never done folding, looks and looks
at my father’s underwear creep up over his
jeans. All the hard mothers glare
at the baskets we wheel around them
and their small children:
they don’t know anything.
They crowd around my thin
sandwich and run up and down
the aisles as if they were not giving
us quarters to wash their dirty socks.
Clothes tumble in big fights and the mothers
sit down on the bench like they’ve been running
too long. Their hair sticks out in gray wires.
Their breasts are sad and used. Their wallets
are thick with coupons and
quarters and we take them all.
Olivia Friedman
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