Merna Dyer Skinner
After Selling Your Lake House

Merna Dyer Skinner - After Selling Your Lake House

Poetry
Merna Dyer Skinner is a poet, photographer, and the president and founder of the communications consulting firm Satori Communications, Inc. Merna’s most recent poems appear in Quartet, The… Read more »
Gerry LaFemina
Another Lesson in the Lesser Miracles

Gerry LaFemina - Another Lesson in the Lesser Miracles

Poetry
Gerry LaFemina is the author of over twenty books, including The Story of Ash (poems, Anhinga Press, 2018) and Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping (prose poems, Madville Publishing, 2020). Madville will… Read more »
Iqra Khan
Hijrah

Iqra Khan - Hijrah

Poetry
Iqra Khan is a bilingual poet, activist, and accidental law graduate from India. Her poems have appeared in The Bombay Review and University of Warwick's journal, Feminist Dissent. Her articles have… Read more »
Emily Franklin
Laundry

Emily Franklin - Laundry

Poetry
Emily Franklin's debut poetry collection Tell Me How You Got Here was published by Terrapin Books in 2021. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, New Ohio Review, Cincinnati Review,… Read more »
Janet Jennings
The Knock

Janet Jennings - The Knock

Poetry
Janet Jennings’ poetry and flash fiction have appeared in Agni Online, Nimrod, Shenandoah, and Verse Daily, among others. She is the author of the chapbook Traces in Water. For twenty years she… Read more »
Caroline Pittman
The Strand at Lough Beg

Caroline Pittman - The Strand at Lough Beg

Poetry
Caroline Pittman lives with her family in Atlanta. Her work can be found in Threepenny, Thrush, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Read more »
John Glowney
Truth

John Glowney - Truth

Poetry
John Glowney is a graduate of the University of Michigan. His poems have appeared more recently in, among others: New Ohio Review, The Bitter Oleander, North American Review, Shenandoah, 32 Poems,… Read more »
Dannye Romine Powell
We Sit in the Red Glider These Late Summer Evenings

Dannye Romine Powell - We Sit in the Red Glider These Late Summer Evenings

Poetry
Dannye Romine Powell’s fifth collection, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, won the Roanoke Chowan Award for 2020 for the best book of poetry published that year by a North Carolinian. Her poems… Read more »

Laundry

Emily Franklin

I do not mind how my son asks me  to switch his laundry from the washer over to the dryer—he has  the skills to start the load himself and has gotten his shit enough together that in a year he will likely leave my house which is the right thing, the act we are supposed to aim for to support even though it feels twisted as the pant legs and towels damp and defeated out of the  wash and of course I want him to be able to be elsewhere and moving wet clothing he gathered himself as though picking through a sad garden  of dirty things and I am reminded in the damp dryer heat of visiting my grandparents in their Florida condo and how beloved I felt in that warm palmy stucco not only with them but surrounded by old people who thought I was wonderful, that just by being young I was also beautiful and carried no shame and how that hot damp followed each step from the tiled pool to their orange doorway, marigold bright because why not it was the end and they knew it was the end and after a long day of doing pretty much nothing I would sit with their loving saggy bodies and play cards or do the laundry, the machine rumbling sounds of pure joy at being used and filled with clothing youthful with hope the way my son’s sweatshirt now is free of his nosebleed, the grime of his job, and I want to slump into the heat of the tiny room  where everything is clean, is warm, is possible.
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