ekleksographia

Everything New Must Be Washed First

My wife removes the tags from my undies but won't let me wear them. "Everything new must be washed first," she says. I pull them on in protest when she leaves. I like to imagine all the hands that folded them over cardboard inserts and kissed the flies with white stickers. Somewhere, a woman at the factory, No. 49 is her name, sparks an acetylene torch and lights the stray threads on the waistband left from the surger. The lines shrivel and corkscrew until they are free to float out windows and into streets, swirling past bodegas with cured pigs' legs hanging from beams, where later she will get a ham sandwich and watch the scum of seafoam wash over weeds until the gnats start biting. But lunch is far away still and her torch hot enough to burn a hole through the cotton if her mind strays. She trims her flame and wilts the thicker threads black. They fall to the floor and curl into small letters, spelling out the words of every life she cannot inspect, clean or dirty.

Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c

August, 2010

Poetry

• Everything New Must Be Washed First

Patrick Crerand

Patrick Crerand has had fiction appear recently in Conjunctions, Barrelhouse, Harpur Palate, and other magazines. Currently he lives in Tampa, Florida where he teaches English at Saint Leo University.