Wash Day & My Great-Grandmother’s Cassettes

Dana Murphy

Wash Day

Her daughters’ tiny cereal spoons rose

and fell in half-sleep hope of fairy godmothers

while she sweated over the pan of eggs,

their smooth white albumens and chalky

yolks yellow as a daycare center

glittering with salt.

The girls dreamed of nests,

lemon petal baths, secret tree coves

where pollen of pine, mulberry, juniper,

smog that had drifted to the Altadena foothills,

and the exhaust of his motorcycle,

was coaxed gently from their braids.

In her bedroom, she found a clean bandanna

to wrap her weeks-old twists.

shivered at her own mother’s scent

in the chest of drawers, brief as the pink

sometimes on white roses.

She summoned the hard mother hands 

to detangle the years,

to heave the old wooden chair from the back 

of the house to the porch ponderously

as she would a child,

without re-bursting the hernia that had been

loosed, an old birthstone, in her belly.

She would comb out the girls’ hair 

on the front porch so the neighbors would know 

they were only crying

salt, water, shea, oil.

My Great-Grandmother’s Cassettes

No sensible chit-chat left her lips

for another’s after September 25, 1981.

Exile, Miami, Los Angeles were moonstones.

Dictator, divorce, hysterectomy the arc of 

one tulip tilting before the rest.

Virus, iron lung, death certificate in English

the lilt and linger

of her eldest daughter sharing a secret in ’54.

Do you hear it?

Every day she poured her voice into

the warm calix of the recorder

like cafecito with cream.

She rewound the tape of her life

and went all the way back by herself to feel it again:

the nation that used to breathe for her.

Returning home via Mexico, she lost her suitcase,

but the trip’s cassette was safe

in the nylon of her lilac-colored bra,

a needle of lightning on stormstruck sand.