American Life in Poetry
Poetry has room for everything and everybody, for every subject and object. Here’s a poem by Sharon Chmielarz, a Minnesota poet, on a subject I’ve never seen written about. And poetry, and American Life in Poetry in particular, now welcomes pillow cleaners.
The Pillow Cleaners Come to Town
and turn the senior citizen center
into an automated assembly line.
Goodbye, dross of long winter nights.
Farewell, old skin cells and reek:
what couldn’t come clean on a clothesline.
Bundles of pillows, caroming, bouncing,
sloshing along, even as more
mistresses of pillows hurry through the door,
hugging stained sacks of feathers
like thoughts kept well past prime.
Sure, they should’ve been thrown out
long ago but – we paid so dearly for them.
Poem copyright 2013 by Sharon Chmielarz from “Love from the Yellowstone Trail” (North Star Press, 2013), and reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by The Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.