It was snowing when I dialed, raining
when I hung up, chaos even for me
who mixes the chaff back into the wheat
and salts the on-ramps and rakes up needles
only to scatter them on the ground and
walk through as if to cut a covenant,
or sew one together. At dawn, with all
the inertia of imagination,
I laced my boots and cradled the laundry.
Is it even worth it to clean these clothes?
No matter. When the washer door clicked shut
I knew that ours is not the slipped disk in
the spine of a novel, it’s just the end
and so we wring it out, make it lie flat.
— Lauren Dominguez Chan is a junior in Grace Hopper College.
