Mariana Bandeira, Servir o Não Racional, 2018
Acrylic on paper
Courtesy of the artist
Artist’s Instagram
I’m quarters
and fluorescent weather.
Midnight hum
of machines
plotting their revolutions.
Lint,
the pale archaeology
of other marriages.
Linen:
the afterlife
of summer.
The glass door
keeps turning
its gibbous eye.
Once I wove a kingdom
out of postponement.
Thread by thread.
Now I feed
the washers
borrowed moons.
Shirts orbit.
A towel opens
like a sail.
Women beside me murmur
about daycare,
overdue bills,
men who travel.
Some men become stories
before they come home.
The machine clicks open.
Everything that endured
the turning
returns warm
and briefly believable.
Every laundromat
is the afterlife
of the field.
Once I wove a shroud
to outlast the night.
Thread
entering
thread.
Morning
undoing
everything.
I fold the horizon
again and again.
Beneath the ecru,
another century
keeps its blue
country.
I am the cloth's
wrong selvage—
the interval
between flower
and shroud.
Poet’s Substack, Instagram, Facebook