Due to this poem’s unique line indents and some of the lines’ length, we strongly suggest reading “Clothes on the Line” on a computer screen to view the poem as the author intended it.

Clothes on the Line
Leslie Lindsay

1.

Who is all buried there?

Your grandfather’s people

An echo of wind.

You think of them deep in the ground, where the storm originates out west.

Do velvet bow and headbands

Wrap around gauzy heads,

Of the desiccating bodies

In the ground?

Is there an apple orchard or pears or a gazebo?

And a bench? For sitting and contemplating such things.

2.

The sky has become a smudge.

Of a bruise.

Slashed with mud and a mix

Of molasses.

3.

Above you, in the basement, a light is coming through, a perfect square. Yellow-white light. Oh! Is that heaven? You walk under it. Peer upward. It’s just the laundry shoot, under the sink. In the bathroom. Someone left the cabinet door open. The storm is over. The sun is beaming through the bathroom window and shining in the basement.

4.

Outside, in the backyard,

stroll through the wet grass,

Matted down.

Clothes on the line.

Ruined. Littering the yard. Draped on the fire pit.

Above, the sky darkens from light blue to blue orange.

Velvet.

It is impossible to walk without crushing clover blossoms.

5.

Are grandpa’s people here? Did they come in with the storm? Let’s pick up the garments.

Are they here? Did they come in from the west? The people?

Of grandpa?

It’s a shame, she says. Her arms are laden with underwear and ghosts of sheets.

What is? you say.

That house. They have lived on that land for centuries.

6.

You think of the people of grandpa.

Centuries. That’s a long time.

Long enough for dead.

The falling-down farmhouse above water.

Barren now.

Mud flats. Monstrous solitude.

—
Leslie Lindsay’s writing has been featured in The Millions, CRAFT Literary, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, On the Seawall, LitHub, North American Review, Ballast Poetry Review, DASH Literary, Neologisms Poetry Journal, among others. Leslie’s fiction has been nominated for Best American Short Stories. She was recently accepted to Kenyon Writers Workshop where she will work with Victoria Chang in poetry. Leslie resides in Greater Chicago and is at work on a memoir excavating her mother’s madness through fragments. She is a former Mayo Clinic child/adolescent psychiatric R.N.

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