Dishes

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Laura Cherry is the author of a chapbook, What We Planted, which was awarded the 2002 Philbrick Poetry Award by the Providence Athenaeum. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including Asphodel, Argestes, Forklift: Ohio, Agenda, and the Vocabula Review. It has also appeared in the anthologies Present Tense: Writing and Art by Young Women, and Vocabula Bound. Laura received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives near Boston with her partner and their three-year-old daughter.

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A thumb-smear on the tile floor, the smell
of blood, menstrual, in the room where I am
on my haunches, waiting to catch my friend
if she pitches forward, giving up what she said

she expected to: she knew it wouldn't take,
didn't even tell us until the midnight call
that fetched my sweetheart - still wearing his coat, ready
for a hospital run - and me, wielding towels.

Her husband tends the three-year-old, hectic
in the late commotion, the grownups gathered
for what must be a party, but too patient
and too sad. And when she settles on the couch -

stanched, hand on the phone - we watch the boy
rocket through the room, firm and loud in his skin,
while his father leaves to stand at the sink
and wash dishes, dishes, every dish in reach.

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