Drowning

Swine Gallery – Chattanooga, TN – 2016

Laundry is women’s work; I’m told. Scrub those clothes until all the stains are gone. Stains from the past. Filth and memories. I’m drowning in that filth. I’m drowning in those memories. I can’t hold my head above water. No matter how hard I scrub, only surface level cleansing succeeds; the stain remaining as a ghost, an incrimination. I wore white and used white clothing with red stains like blood. I attempted to wash it away. I hung that deep suffocating sorrow of trauma never erased along a clothing line. I let the fully drenched clothing spill water freely upon the floor as I lifted them from the bucket. Each piece being scrubbed in the water tainted and stained from the one before. Once all the pieces were hung, I cut the line and let it fall to the ground.

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