The City She Was

Bay Bridge Abstraction

22 Pageant of Scrutiny The women at the laundromat across the street fret over their modes of transport (shopping cart, duffel, canvas tote, plastic bin). Because I’m their spectator, framed in my window, I’m also a talisman against cages. They sit outside of their labors to watch me watch them. I’m their poppet, so they interrogate my hermitage. It’s because of love, says the kind one and the cruel one says, it’s because of impertinence, and the conciliatory one says, it’s all those things, but perhaps we shouldn’t judge since she’s just like us, etc., and the compassionate one says, let’s send her up a ladder, and the drunk one says, I wonder who the hell she comes around, and the one with a wimple trimmed in blue said, I wish it was me, and along comes the other one, the angry one: if we’d have quit smoking in the sixties, not given ourselves over, I’ve got an idea, let’s start a posse, unfurl the cue cards, so that it seems she’s taken over, and she has—the other ones tend to her, purge me from their crosshairs. I’m the one who used to look in windows and say, she just does it to herself because she’s a sucker and the void has such a sexy pitch in his voice. I used to wash my clothes in that place, took it wrapped in a sheet like a corpse of want and discharge and worry. To alleviate ourselves of filth we moved around the small hall of machines, banged at the change machine when the monotony rage came on. In the laundromat we were strangers but also repentant and transgressive. From my perch the women seem like specks now. We go, we go. They’re all complicit with my cage. I’d trade all my seeds for a gust out of these millennial doldrums. The tossing swish of the machine might be the best trade in town. ...