GREEN, GREEN, & TENDER

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Fine Arts

by

Karly R. Milvet

May, 2016

© Copyright

All rights reserved

Except for previously published materials

Green, Green, & Tender written by

Karly R. Milvet

B.A., Kent State University, 2012

M.F.A., Kent State University, 2016

Approved by

Catherine Wing , Advisor

Robert Trogdon , Chair, Department of English

James L. Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Science

Table of Contents

Part I

Midnight, Tiny Tokyo...... 2

Coming Over...... 3

Someday Knowing...... 4

Advice I Should Have Taken...... 6

[ ] ...... 7

Dear Anna...... 8

A Story of Origins...... 10

A Poem Is the Threat Of What We’re Made Of...... 11

The Underwater Box Escape...... 13

A Biography of Witholding...... 14

[ ] ...... 15

Dear Anna...... 16

Self-Portrait in Perpetuity...... 17

From the Ninth Story...... 18

[ ] ...... 19

Self-Portrait, Reflection in Glass...... 20

Dear Anna...... 21

Houdini Talks Craft...... 22

[ ] ...... 23

i

Poem In the Shape of Two Prostitutes On Crosby St...... 24

Dear Anna...... 26

[ ] ...... 27

Sorrow & Declarations From My Tear Duct...... 28

Part II

Questions For Profiling Mortality...... 30

Self-Portrait, Yearning...... 31

Smoke...... 32

Dear Anna...... 33

[ ] ...... 34

Houdini’s Metamorphosis...... 35

Elegy For Finishing a Good Book...... 37

Whale Song...... 39

Poem For the Shape Of My Crooked Mouth...... 40

[ ] ...... 41

Dear Anna...... 42

Informal Fugue For Piano, Four Hands...... 43

[ ] ...... 44

Houdini On Making Art Out Of Obstacle...... 45

Dear Anna...... 46

New Metrics For Assimilation...... 47

ii [ ] ...... 49

A Poem Is Still the Threat Of What We’re Made Of...... 50

The Barn Door, Ajar...... 51

I’m Becoming a Regular at the Garrettsville Laundromat...... 52

iii

Part I

1

Midnight, Tiny Tokyo

Goodnight my pocket-size foreign-tongued city, my neon calligraphy moon-heart, terracotta floor pot rounding out the corners of the room

Goodnight my wing, my latitude my unambiguous, quite significant you sauterne of noble rot sweet-mouthed distinction on a Tuesday afternoon lit up

My love you are teeming with lip and lemon

Sleep well my urban wilderness my kit-kat, laugh track, soft boiled egg via release of steel coil from vending machine

My love you amuse me with your loyalty to please

Far-away pillow how I venture to you, keep you the way a conch shell is packed from the beach in my ear the ocean each time so delightfully new

2 Coming Over

What breathes between us is the color of a feather. It wasn’t hard to find you. I knew to look left. In this town, you look like everyone I know except with wings. Tell me again the shape of the rain and the tenderness of elephants who remember. How are you? Be gentle. I can’t think of a thing to say except I’m hungry and I forgot to take my shoes off.

3 Someday Knowing

I don’t want anyone to think I’m anything less than a very affectionate cat or more than the delicacy of my atomic composition. How our bodies hum together in similar blood sound though we try not to be alone in our separate vessels. Some of us want to take everything in but I don’t want anyone viewing me that closely.

I don’t want anyone thinking I’m any kind of possibility.

I’m no poker chip or porcupine, no

I am the unrealized idea of some cerulean coastline, like Nice.

Here is a photograph of Nice I didn’t take.

I’ve never been to France but Nice looks like a place anyone would like to go, I mean the sand is so white how could anything bad happen and look at all the umbrellas which intimate endless sun and salt and sexy tanlines. I mean think of the anonymity, the hush of white sheets, that tourist feeling.

4

I don’t want anyone knowing more than enough.

I don’t want anyone knowing I haven’t been there that I’d really someday like to go and bare my ocean colors.

So here’s this photograph stuck to the wall with tape that will someday peel the paint off.

5 Advice I Should Have Taken

I’m not sure what to call it other than a vortex. I was driving on the highway and it started to snow, which is fine and I slowed down, but then I had to focus, to listen, I had to turn off the song at the good part. I sang the lyric anyway—don’t be my last strange encounter—creeping south on 77 at 25 mph, my voice trying to break the hypnosis of the snow coming down in a sucking spiral. My heartbeat roared under the sound of the engine and the wet tires and I wished I could catch up to the red taillights so far ahead. The anonymous tracks were already swallowed up white and something like dread came over me. I imagined my brakes locking my hands powerless on the steering wheel, bracing for the impact of the ditch, hoping my little hatchback wouldn’t flip over, that there wouldn’t be any blood or severe injury, that it wouldn’t take too long for anyone to find me because of the dark and the snow. My face flushed above the sound of the engine as I thought of something my grandmother said once, after riding in an ambulance. She told me to invest in my underwear, in case of emergency. I wouldn’t want to be caught in some ratty pair of stained whatever. They cut your clothes off, she said, They see everything.

6 [ ]

I catalogue the shapes of shadows: bell peal and cobblestone, umlaut and ice. This foreign city has me cast in the role of the living. I am everywhere looking like I belong anywhere else. The postman drops letters in square little boxes. I wonder if I shouldn’t try so hard to be staying.

7 Dear Anna

again, it’s past midnight and the lights are still on even though I’m late paying my bill because online banking is currently unavailable due to regularly scheduled system maintenance some electronic power gives me this message asks for patience states commitment to exceptional service with the exception of these few hours from midnight to four

I know I should just go to bed the silver ache in the back of my skull needles into my neck when I sit alone at this hour dissecting bank statement intricacies and credit card debt it’s dangerous to chart expenditures and loss and I know it should give up the dark what is less real than money especially when there is none these impossible numbers these dates and transactions

8 all add up to nothing something to keep in mind next time I try to login before sleeping and induce this wild anxiety beaten back by the lead bars of the american dollar sign which is strong they say or maybe not

9 A Story of Origins

Today the sun rises in the spirit of gasoline pooled in a vacant parking lot

Before breakfast I contemplated the complexities of late September Ohio weather

how the sky is my interior color

On rugged African plains we became vertical prompting a new sense of gravity and power

Pangaea, that undrowned terrain green and thick, awaiting human footprint

violently split into six or seven continents jagged and raw like hooked fish with memories of an embracing ocean

If I am not my mother, I am something closer to the water that pushes back against me

10 A Poem Is the Threat Of What We’re Made Of

If writing is to chronicle beyond the body, to what extent can I hope to remember?

I am some kind of desperate archivist bent on determining long-term value using line breaks and shipwrecks, wanting the scope of the thing to be seen from the inside out. My inventory of flotsam and jetsum is ever-increasing. I’ve stockpiled mirrors, blue elephants, water pressure, frankincense and winter. Stained tea mugs lipped Shell Pink, the ocean.

The danger of all this heart being a question of performance because my crescent hands are always full and I can’t be sure of anything

11 except there’s more where this comes from.

12 The Underwater Box Escape

I am relieving stress again with the television, looking to extricate myself from this empty apartment. In very distant resemblance, here is Adrien Brody, his sweeping height and angular jawline, playing Houdini. An illusionist calls to our imagination, our fear, calls us to believe a man capable of shirking loose iron cuffs without aid, hanging chained upside down four minutes in a Chinese water torture cell.

Magic makes me skeptical of the human body. Though soft and skeletal we are flexible enough to escape and endure. But how does he do it? What’s thrilling is trying to see and being left wondering. And probably we shouldn’t want to know. I don’t want to.

I’m avoiding stress by trying not to look at all the nothing all around me, all the nothing that is everywhere pooling while I’m watching water fill this chamber walled by glass panes, wondering how long I will make it in here.

13 A Biography of Witholding

You could ask him, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. In fact, he doesn’t want to talk about anything at all, though his fear of speech makes him seem generous and he is an exceptional host who wouldn’t dream of bruising the gin. A piano is hunched against the wall of his living room until the glasses are empty and the guests are gone and he sits down to play something like Bach alone in the mostly-dark. He hasn’t spoken a word since age twelve when he was rendered mute after witnessing an incident involving a straightjacket and an amateur magician’s fatal error. In the city he is a thirty-nine-year-old man in a good- enough apartment with good-enough friends and a job that affords him two yearly trips to the dentist although he wouldn’t dream of going. He doesn’t sleep well because of a nightmare where he’s lost and being pursued by something invisible in the streets of a familiar town, his clothes wet and his dark hair falling out. He knows the night will come when he sees what is chasing him. But he doesn’t want to talk about it.

14 [ ]

As if in apology, he sent me a picture of the stars and a glossy knot moon that kept me up at night. There was no note or return address. It is difficult to know the luxury of his disappearance. Not the shape of a ghost like a gossamer whisper. More like a pale elephant in the corner at a Victorian dinner party, watching the silk women step lightly in slippers.

15 Dear Anna

Since living alone I’ve been on edge. I sleep with a marble and steel letter opener and a flashlight on my nightstand. I have this recurring dream of a break-in.

While my teeth fall out one at a time a non-descript male comes in and dumps all my dry goods on the tile floor. I vacuum them up, the teeth too, once he leaves. Maybe the vacuum seems odd, huh.

16 Self-Portrait in Perpetuity

You slow down like bruised fruit, decrescendo as framed still life.

See everything from the other side. A coffin raw in a fresh grave raises a bed of questions that go unanswered.

These more and more the danger.

All this new to you. The muted nestling.

Grief a stone in a well so deep you’ll never hear it drop.

17 From the Ninth Story

I can’t tell who can see me naked alone enjoying this hotel room where watery gray in yellow smear of lamplight my breasts are thrown against the wall the windows are floor to ceiling and it’s wildly dark outside so that my body in reflection looks holographic on the building across the street no one witnesses me pressing my hips to the cold glass there is Lake Erie beyond the theater and a traffic light turning yellow now red to stop no cars that are coming and for reasons I don’t know yet I’m thinking I could love you without saying the words because somehow language is not consistent enough for me to mean it the love I’ve known is just a series of colors signaling mute to a vacant intersection

18 [ ]

Like many small sins from trees leaves fall, soldiers disillusioned by loss and battlefield strategy, jumping to the grave all together. I strain to hear their dying prayers over your breath. Most nights I’m awake. From the pillow, how unknown you can appear to me.

19

Self-Portrait, Glass Reflection

once the shape of my body was a miracle soft and new breath between each hardening vertebrae with age gravity gathers more slope and downward direction skeletons balk my grandmother can’t walk or hold conversation beyond the weather through the window today it is raining and it’s not letting up in our chests our hearts ripen and drop

20 Dear Anna

Yesterday I did my taxes and thus far, adulthood seems a rip-off. I get depressed about money so I spent the afternoon watching home renovations on television. Seeing a house so raw can be tough on the homeowners who cry a lot and fret the budget as if HGTV would let them down in front of an audience. They always get their open concept, the outdoor space for entertaining, a gas stove, double vanities. Is this what I’m supposed to want? A custom mudroom, walk-in closets, sleek master-en-suite and a husband with a wallet to fund the whole project? I remember our apartment with the clingy ocean-surf shower curtain and how we kicked dust around the micro- kitchen, dancing or making a toast. I go back to that summer, coffee mugs brimming Old Fashioneds. The vibrant sugar rim and the bitters that made my jaw ache even after the cup was empty.

21 Houdini Talks Craft

after a few minutes in a chinese water torture cell you start to wonder what you’re trying to do who you’re trying to be on the other side of the velvet curtain the mind tends to believe what it has already seen the crowd seeks to unshackle its own cowering dog mystery some exorcism of cuffed phobia I show them it’s this wonder that’s the draw of my performance we’re all escape artists in one way or another looking to break the straight jacket of lung-crushing boredom fear and pain

I only want an audience to validate the pretense of my possible death we all need a degree of illusion to accept the obstacle of living

22 [ ]

Considering fresh fruit at the corporate chain grocery store, quietly distressed over pit- hearted plums and mangoes, how we don’t love each other anymore. An old man pushes his cart past, nudges his hat up, says I look lost. My thumbs press a bruised peach in shallow regard of rot. I put it back among the others. I hope not.

23 Poem In the Shape Of Two Prostitutes on Crosby St.

that sexual time he slept over how against my ear his singular mouth sighing oo oo made me feel familiar when it got too hot he opted for open windows in goose bump february ohio when there are no geese but their ardor for aerial geometry was in me as I lessened the distance between us like the oo in their name that night when I knew by his slackened jaw he slept I crept to close the windows and outside were two stilettoed women in the street by the way they bounced headlights off their hips it was obvious one woman dipped to the driver before both hopped in back I hoped they hadn’t settled for too little back in bed his arm arced across my chest with a few hours till morning when he’d be gone

24 in some stories something like love can be measured in pages in other cases it looks like the intersection of bare thighs and white headlights

I didn’t ask for this shape to be mine or his shadow to be along me I didn’t know ways voices become imprinted on bodies like light beams or sunrise like goose in black ink on paper oo oo years out I see us now as nothing more than two yellow circles in a dark square that was only night because we called it that

25 Dear Anna

One good thing here is Skeet, the building’s maintenance man. Half the time I can’t understand him because of his muddy Southern accent but when I do it’s always worthwhile.

Once he had to wear a giant respirator to remove what was left of a dead bird from an air duct. We speculated about the effects of delayed corpse removal, the threat of invisible airborne toxins.

He’s also great to have around when your pilot light goes out, although I feel bad and apologize for bothering him.

I say I’m sorry so much it isn’t worth counting.

26 [ ]

Autumn begins in broken blood vessels, seeping discoloration warm and wet, leaf by vein by leaching vein until the release of a stabbing puncture wound, the first frost and hemophiliac autumn will bleed for days, steady streams of rusted leaves pooling curbside and coagulating on blade cut lawns.

27 Sorrow & Declarations From My Tear Duct

I am a struggling artist. By that I mean I struggle and I make no art.

I trembled once near an original Cézanne but the stone never hit the bottom of the well. I don’t think it's impossible, I’m just saying

I could stand once in a while to be vulnerable instead of a lifeless quarry in the wake of disaster or intense human awareness like violins or hurricanes.

Only one function is mine though I’m all the time failing to take up my duty.

I’ll surprise you yet, body with ceremony like an egg laid or a watermelon on a grapevine.

28

Part II

29 Questions For Profiling Mortality

If writing is a measure of any given eye what language am I really speaking

How many rivers does it take to get to the top of the mountain

Past what limits can I envision the ancient earthenware narrative of my life

Could I be more than a chipped brown jug if some more decipherable tongue were depicted on my lip

Can you see how I have ended up in this museum and how death has always been so deliciously upon me

Do you know by death I mean like writing words onto a page

Is there some sense of royalty in my curvature that warrants the expense of such fine ink

When you read this do you understand all I’m asking is who should exist like I do in so hushed a body

30 Self-Portrait, Yearning

I am past trying to lick this feather.

Has it always been this way? The searching, the missing, the dying ivy, the heart a husk, my breath that reaches like the stem of a fall flower toward last eeking light.

Thin spiderwebs thread the lawn. What will see me through

I am always trembling. And then you.

31 Smoke

I wake up I smoke I bathe I smoke I drive away I sing I park I smoke I sit and smoke on the sole-busted sidewalk Or stand in the gap-toothed driveway and smoke I set the table burn the fish (remorseful) smoke Scour the knives and gut the fridge flush the fish and smoke I pray for the bees in the drought and smoke Worry black and brick and bees and fish and smoke Pour the cow and milk the milk and smoke All night I smoke and clamber up the hill without a light I assimilate I smoke I unloosen I smoke Bid against high tides high winds high rise and smoke I position my lips like a canon and smoke Sense the light and the nucleus and smoke I paint a naked smoking woman longing for heat and feathers I smoke when I forget if I am awake or here or are we there yet My routine is important: to mourn and rejoice and grow tired and smoke Sometimes I saunter past God and look over my shoulder and smoke Concoct theories about wind speed and estimate darkness and smoke I smoke and abound in the asteroid belt, hypothesize great fires Lament the tragedy of nebulas confined to telescopes and smoke I orbit the moon in a divine fucking holiness-of-the-cosmos way and smoke I am bending the confines of finite and smoke and ashes.

32 Dear Anna

Remember that night we sat on the curb in front of the laundromat, waiting for the washers to be done? It was dark early and the train station was lit up across the street, huffing and grunting like a restless dog on a rug.

We saw people from a distance and wanted to hear their foreign tongues in conversation with each other, but we were alone and silent. Your cigarette burned slower than mine.

We couldn’t name whatever it was we felt we were losing but we felt it all the time smouldering close by. It seemed important to anticipate the ashes and prepare to house the ghosts.

It rained through March so the river flooded. We joined our neighbors piling sandbags to stop the dark water. I am always taking internal inventory, estimating the heave of the current, waiting for some new awareness to take shape.

33 [ ]

My mouth, the tawny cushion of my heart’s projection. Well of humor, velvet curtain. Song laden, wing shaped, truth disheveled landscape. Horizon askew, watercolor, casting shadow on my chin, window of sustenance, grinner of grins. It’s from here that I harbor and navigate.

34 Houdini’s Metamorphosis

A magician is bagged and then sealed into a trunk by an assistant, who seconds later appears bagged and sealed in the trunk while the magician stands free.

Tonight the curtains really are red velvet and she walks too close on purpose to brush the dusky lips of the theater against her bare shoulder.

Harry wheels the trunk out front and center. It has its own secrets it trusts him to keep. It is dark inside the embracing canvas sack but he doesn’t need to see to loosen the knots and free his wrists. She locks him in with a smile for the crowd. For them the illusion begins when the magician disappears but the real trick is the woman being drawn from the unfastened trunk still smiling by her husband, her slender, rope-cuffed limbs bound up for his devotion to spectacle and magic. She bows alongside him but the applause is his. He is hailed king for his escape while she remains the living prop, the conduit, the one willing to submit to the tight dark from a bright stage so he can be born onto it. And again

35 tomorrow night they’ll perform as The Star & his assistant, man and woman, World Famous Self-Liberator and his sweet little wife.

36 Elegy For Finishing a Good Book

Like most kinds of happiness this one is sad.

I am a slow reader and have become more selective unwilling to let just any book fall into my hands for fear of dissatisfaction. I demand a little trust up front for any investment. Chalk it up to experience. A simulation of dying, dwelling deliberately in a state of paginated suffering.

The saturation of language and narrative overwhelms me like strong black wind mottles rooftops and wreaks havoc in the barn shrieking at horses.

The radius of debris and any resulting casualties the real feat of the storm. There’s usually at least one.

A mouse stiff in the corner, my own extroverted heart.

The extent of the damage measured afterward when the cover is shut a final time and I hold it

37 like a tiny coffin listening to the echo of last words in the first yellow smears of morning.

38 Whale Song

What can’t sing anymore is a washed-up eighty foot bowhead whale after three days of post mortem sun bloat the gaseous target of a purposed blade on a Scandinavian beach off the Baltic from its punctured belly yielding one last raucous note

The force is tremendous in range and direction intestines surge forth amid hot spray of sour blood lungs kidney heart and blubber steaming on the sand and indecipherable in royal cream & plum marbled rot

Nothing short of a spectacle, the display of how the body poisons in the absence of spirit language of imploded stars, no more the resinous pitch and arc over miles of ocean current

39 Poem For the Shape Of My Crooked Mouth

First vent where my voice first escaped me, I offer my tongue to figure the depth of separation, slipped tectonic plates, soft lipped crater in the middle of a desert, erratic pitch and roll for the rest of my life, horizon angled slant along the fault line, blustering wind subsided into white marbled pink stone, a delicate negative of sound like snow, epicenter of my first kiss where I heard blood in my wrist pummeling an ancient love song

40 [ ]

last line from Virginia Woolf

I keep coming upon words I can’t define without using some form of the word itself. Silver, outside, reflection, dizzy. Today the word is color. It’s December and it’s still so green. The way the grass has grown is unsettling when I’m shrouded in some animal instinct to brace for cold, the world compressed to flurry and hush. I'm hanging on that the future is dark which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

41 Dear Anna

I read about a woman who takes digital pictures of her face every night after each day’s exposure and expression.

For twelve years now she’s documented the loss of fat from her brow bone and jawline, the eruption of sunspots and star births across her ripening cheeks. When she dies, who will explore the file containing this progression?

Maybe they won’t call it decay. Maybe, development.

42 Informal Fugue for Piano, Four Hands

One insists the whole world is not a love letter, but writes them anyway. The other seeks the bathtub, its clawfoot consolation.

One holds fire sacred and terms it renewal. The other worships by the light of the streetlamp, how it cuts the street down.

One could stand to drive the stake through, knowing the anatomy and deficits of the heart. The other gets caught measuring happiness against the stake.

One coaxes the cream to the top like a true artist. The other is learning to navigate the world like a blank canvas.

One makes a habit out of archival so when it comes to remembering, there is a vibrant map. The other pins memory to a crowded spreading board like another rare moth.

One says, this looks like a good place for a set of small stars, and marks the woman’s naked hip with black pen. The other has kept time with a vase of dried roses reflected in an oval mirror.

One conceives of love like space exploration: the Great Frontier. The other is always tagging along, wants to be an astronaut, too.

43 [ ]

I am in love like a Ferris Wheel. In this business of lifting and holding, everyone wins. Failure is a straight line down. I want you to know how generous I can be, so I’ll show you something beautiful from many perspectives. The mute purple lake cradling the slick white moon like a fairytale. The city below we’ve discovered on foot. Between us, the quiet. A more accurate language. Our hands together have always known the joy they contained within themselves.

44 Houdini On Making Art Out Of Obstacle

Once, I saw a mental patient writhing like a netted fish in a bone-dry concrete hospital room, his canvas-wrapped silhouette straining against itself in some invisible current. He wore a straightjacket. His spine bowed over cinder block, brow twisted in anguish. He saw me and wailed like he was hurling a tin can against my offending gaze. His eyes grew dark, hard, and closed. I trembled at this man. Was I grateful he couldn’t be free or mortified? To find out, I put one on myself.

45 Dear Anna

Now that I’ve fallen in love all I can think about is death. It’s hard to say whether loneliness invokes its hooded presence or vice versa but I’m confident we’re all plummeting toward it faster and faster each second.

On the highway I pass a flashing neon sign reminding me traffic fatalities are up eighteen percent. Beneath the bed I’ve seen a scatter of crumbling beetles. There’s a cold bird I could never have saved in the yard one morning.

Each time I see her my grandmother tells me she misses Jack. What I want to ask her is how much it hurts.

46 New Metrics For Assimilation

Around me the blue house like a hushed mirror more and more familiar

We measure our bodies each day against the door frame to remember God

This much loneliness in this much home by however much holy spirit

From conversion to conversion you can expect to lose a little each time

I pretend not to keep track letting one equation eclipse another, asking

Can I take the square root of forever without factoring in a question mark?

Who can with a steady hand find the circumference of resurrection?

By now it doesn’t matter we can’t draw the height of faith, can only wed our separate vessels

Like two moons we sleep in orbit, awash with cells that thrum behind our faces

47 so fast we can’t swerve to avoid ourselves.

48 [ ]

He brings loaves of artisanal bread which he butters late into the night. The knife is dull from cutting and sometimes he uses his hands to tear. His thick square fingers. He offers me a piece smeared with soft pale butter. We stand close and chew, touching elbows near the kitchen sink, loving each other obviously.

49 A Poem Is Still the Threat Of What We’re Made Of

I like the idea of the exoskeleton, wearing my bones on the outside. Think I could be happy in the visible protection of my softest tissues. I’d click and shrug around in tune with the trees or the ocean, molt ceremoniously, knowing the mortal danger of shirking my armor for the sake of transformation. In each poem is the pleasure of learning the heart as it’s vulnerable.

50 The Barn Door, Ajar

Green, green, and tender is the ivy rushing in like a woman like a woman’s dress dressing a woman’s body, wanting to touch everything and laughing. I am happy to hold her in her green light against me, how she curls and vines around my paint-peeling edges, touches me delicately on the inside too where everything happens invisible. I am myself in the peal of a church bell plaiting the morning with ceremony. She draws easily up to me. If I could say joy I’d say that.

51 I’m Becoming a Regular at the Garrettsville Laundromat

People will tell you Ohio is dull with nothing to offer anyone who has any sense of the world. Maybe they’ve all been to Milan or Vancouver or NOLA, gained a formal appreciation for fine art fine architecture fine piece of ass or not. This morning the Sky Plaza parking lot unfurls mostly empty beneath low licks of sunshine, against a backdrop treeline flushed with the season and fleshed out by sky sky sky, the same color as my detergent: All. And all is right. All this rolling asphalt, the scratched up glass door labeled In, the wheeled metal racks like boxy mannequins lining the far back wall, a row of 70s orange dryers not responsible for any shrunken or damaged articles, my off-white sheets swirling in the soapy water by some quarter-fueled invisible power I’m not supposed to see. All this little magic, this small-town aesthetic, these rumbling illusions, this tumble-dry poetry, the artificial time I am forced to wait quietly when I am typically so loud inside. Here is a picture of the universe, genesis drawn from the spin cycle, a bleach haired woman watching me sort my thongs from my socks. When I forget to turn the dryer on she presses start for me.

52