© delana dameron
I am closer to knowing
after Phillip Levine
I kneel in my porcelain tub, thigh-
deep in water, to wash the weeks worth
of clothes that piled up in the center
of my floor. I can’t say I know anymore
now what work is, but I’m closer
to knowing sacrifices my grandmother made,
a domestic in those grandiose white houses
on the
families that paid others to do their work.
I can’t say how she did it – scrubbing
the filth from the clothes by hand,
how she spent hours rubbing her knuckles
together – as I am now – to get the friction
needed, the friction and simplicity I took
for granted in those large metal contraptions
of detergents and softeners to rinse clean
our daily sweat and dirt. growing up
will do this, I suppose, when you run
prematurely away from safekeeping
and you find yourself on a Saturday night
forced to forfeit amenities I never once,
before now, had to pay for and cannot now
afford. working up a sweat, my hands
softened and rubbed raw at once, smelling
of downy, wringing the privilege from too many
pairs of jeans, I am thankful for this
meditation in the bathtub, this homage
to the woman who, decades back,
did the same – and I suppose, work is not
doing things out of affordability, but
doing the back-bending labor for a dime,
for three children and an absent husband.
work is not holding your own intimates
between your fingers, but a stranger’s,
plunging them down below the suds,
and picking them up to the light to see
how much more is required of you
before you are done.
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