James Bland is the featured poet this month at ArLiJo.
Clothesline
After washing clothes in the Maytag, dad would haul them to the backyard in a green laundry basket, cooked on one side because I once left it too close to the heater.
He’d lurch forward like a robot, the knitted sack that contained the wooden clothespins baby-birded in the nook between chin and clavicle.
Unable to do it herself, grandma would eyeball him from her bedroom window: “Clothespin them at the seams. If you spread them out, they’ll dry faster …”
Glimpses — in his frustration, when she corrected him; in his pride, when she was content — of the boy he once was.
Copyright © 2010 by James Bland.
Biography:
James Bland earned an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and a PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard University. He has received a collegiate Academy of American Poet \’s Prize, a Bread Loaf Writer\’s Workshop Scholarship, a Saratoga Springs Writer\’s Fellowship, a Key West Writer\’s Fellowship, and has been awarded two MacDowell Colony residencies.
His work has or will appear in Callaloo, Agni Magazine, Columbia Magazine, Key West Review, Muleteeth, The Windless Orchard, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares Literary Journal, Standing on the Verge, South Carolina Review, Blue Moon Review, Antioch Review, and Potomac Review.
To read more of his work, visit: ArLiJo.com
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