How to Fold Laundry
by CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue
Sometimes flooding the basement is the only way
to save you from having to fold laundry. What they
don’t tell you about parenthood is the goddamned socks
never end. This is not a metaphor for love, but it should
be. Socks under the bed. Socks behind the dryer
gathering lint. Socks named Cynthia I should’ve taken
back to my hotel room that one night in Cleveland if only
I’d dared. Socks that should be in pairs, but are never
found in the same place.There is only so much brokenness
to fix in any one house before you start looking
for things to nudge off the edge. This is how a man
lets grief in: by turning a screwdriver just enough
to hold the pieces together and then fall apart.
___
CL Bledsoe is the author of seventeen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the novel The Funny Thing About…. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs with Michael Gushue at https://medium.com/@howtoeven
Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press and he co-curates the reading series Poetry at the Watergate. His work can be found in journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Germ, and American Letters & Commentary and his books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood (“a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood” -New York Times) of Washington, D.C.