A Woman Hanging Out Her Family’s Washing
During the Harsh Winter in Eastern Kentucky
Like my grandmother, the dress doesn’t fit her.
And it’s thick sweaters instead of an overcoat.
Like my dead mother, she has wild black hair
and props up a clothesline with a yew branch.
A dark moves by the creek. A snake perhaps.
Ice stalactites from the eaves of a row house
testify to what’s necessary to survive here:
to let pain melt then forget to summon it
even once as the sound of a slow freight.
When she was a fleur-de-lis too beautiful
for the snapshot moment, she showed up
the sun and moon. Now, she is filigreed
with tattooing and scarring and starlight
in laceless, newspaper-filled work shoes.
Soon, she’ll glimpse herself in a mirror:
a ghost straight out of Dorothea Lange.
The place is a heaven of snakes, though
seeing one in winter is always a bad sign.
About Roy Bentley
