The Laundresses

How many and who folded 
and how long was the walk back?

Their presence defined by their labor,
bedclothes draped over the maguey—

colorless, near dry. By erasure,

like my craving for narrative
within the purely imagistic:

he spilled the wine but kept his erection
while she ran to the kitchen for seltzer, 

salt. What’s the gender of water?

Feminine though, for fluidity, 
it takes the masculine article.

Women retain and fetch it, strained 
under its weight for miles for centuries.

Fleshy and slow to grow, the maguey 

connotes strength, resourcefulness,
tolerates what I can’t: desert, neglect, fire. 

Inside the mosquito net, I slept badly, 
replaying a petty argument.

The empty vacation days stretching 

wider through the partly cloudy solstice, 
the strawberry moon less red than I’d wanted. 

My mother labored three times,
pushed out my brother, me, my other brother, 

his image, then hers, then his again

before her tubal ligation. My father, a surgeon, 
lived on the labor and delivery floor—

but I’m writing about weather, aperture,
absence, who has withstood the worst.

Credit

Copyright © 2026 by Lindsay Bernal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 13, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets. 

About this Poem

“I wrote ‘The Laundresses’ in response to Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s photograph, Las lavanderas sobreentendidas, that I first saw at El Museo del Barrio. Sobreentendida burrowed inside my brain—its etymology preoccupied me. I kept mistranslating it as ‘above understanding,’ a beyond-understanding. The laundresses don’t appear in the photograph, but their presence is implied by bed linens left to dry in the wild on some magueys—or maybe the magueys are meant to be the laundresses. My poem fixates on what we infer from an absence, an omission from a narrative. How my mother put my dad through medical school, then disappeared into their offspring—into domestic labor—once his obstetrical practice got going. The poem ultimately tries to reverse her erasure.”
—Lindsay Bernal