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Copyright © 2017 Michael McFee. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2017.
The lines sag deeper and deeper with sweet wet gossip. The clever pins do headstands all day, jaws clenched. My parents preached the virtues of clothes dried outside. Dryers are a rich man's fad, the static can kill you. A Halloween of underwear, haunting the neighborhood. The socks' threadbare parody of Christmas morning. The shirts surrender, they pray, they are crucified. The hung pants stiffen like casts in the hungry sun. I press out their rigor mortis with Gothic devotion.
Brookshire had come to work second shift at Walker Manufacturing the day it opened and stayed until the recession shut it down a dozen years later.
Four lanes over, a plump helium heart— slipped, maybe, from some kid’s wrist or a rushed lover’s empty passenger seat through a half-cracked car window— rises like a shiny purple cloudlet toward today’s gray mess of clouds, trailing its gold ribbon like lightning that will never strike anything or anyone here on the forsaken ground, its bold LOVE increasingly illegible as it ascends over the frozen oaks, riding swift currents toward the horizon, a swollen word wobbling out of sight.