This January, the arts community in Kentucky had a close…
Laundry Woman
My great-grandmother agitated
Mrs. Worldly’s wash every week
over the hot flash and glow
of the fire in the misery shed.
Hand on rough stick, grandmother
pulled around the glob
of tangled shirts and sheets;
she stirred as if hauling the weighted
laundry about an axis, sloshy seas
yielding a watery soup, thin gruel, sure,
but nutrition enough to feed her
fatherless children, nutrition enough
to bring us into this unimagined World.