To the Girl at the 24-Hour Laundromat

If you are here after midnight, you want more
than just clean clothes. Yes, you are balancing a basket

against your right hip. Jeans, shirts, underwear spill over,
a torn plastic rim digs into your skin. But, the truth is

you like the smell: cheap laundry soap and steam, oil
and sweat from local machinists’ uniforms, even a faint scent

of fried foods that reminds you of your own job as a waitress.
You fish through your pockets for quarters, tip money

because more people are leaving less these days, then
search the change machine in case someone has left

coins behind.  No one here bothers you.  No one wants
to make trouble at this hour. Not the young woman

who folds children’s clothes on the table or the man
rubbing his two-day scruff of a beard while staring

at his clothes twirling in the dryer. Not even the kid
who sports ear buds and hums while throwing shirts and pants

into a pile, not caring about wrinkles or untreated stains.
In the lull around 2 a.m., when you are alone, you search

for what is left behind: a single sock tucked in a corner, a pair of jeans
just one size larger than what you usually wear, a Kurt Cobain T-shirt,

even a sweater, one that you slide over your head, swallowing you,
until you almost believe you could become someone else.

---

---