Aging clothespins turn gray,
a silver gray to honor long service.
The smoothest & oldest have round heads
& two legs, no coiled springs between
to pin cotton cloth to cotton line.
My nostrils pricked by damp & soap
& bleach, I choose the roundheads first,
try to hang the entire load without needing
those pairs of sticks forced together
like forever kissing lips. Two pins
for two washcloths, sheets pinned
at matched corners, one at the middle.
Morning sun warms & wind swings
the basketful dry before dinner.
Bras & undies dry in bedrooms
where the boys won't see them.
Lea's Battle Ship Poetics
by Doug Anderson
She sits there on that high hill just sits there and lets things pass through her until one snags and she fits it into the pattern of this fine mesh of what spirit? But, ah, there's a cowboy hat and a cherry bomb tattoo and it snags and what she lets through may, I say, may be caught second time around like that oil pan off an old Hudson or that artificial leg toward morning she's collected some radio signals from a dead ship and a janitor's song and some folderol from a church picnic with iced tea fried chicken collards and a whole lot of stentorian god-speak with apple pie and ice cream. I'll be damned if all those things aren't moving around in one another's magnetic fields, some kind of counterpoint that happens each time she breathes it's a mobile only no wires there's a piece of mirror turning on a spider web and now she's a signal beacon says come on up I've got something to read and somehow it all works. Then she pulls this silk thread and it becomes a form.
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