Poetry |

“Scrubbed”

Scrubbed

 

 

The pot, having been useful

in the way objects with one job and not another can be useful,

which is to say melting golden onions, a low hum of spices,

waits to be washed. If I heft it

once more from stove to sink, I’ll be done in,

failure of planning and prioritization, i.e.

weightlifting is supposed to happen every T, TH, 10 a.m.

but doesn’t. The pot’s not a real Le Creuset. Those cost

more than I’m willing to spend. But the job gets done.

 

I didn’t say I didn’t have a job.

For three minutes today, I tutored

a midwifery student on prepositions

in an evidence-based practice. Because it involves

getting up at 4 a.m. which would wound our days,

the biting comments to our kids, the compensating calories,

my sister tells my mom we can’t drive her to the airport

at 5 in the morning. When the sponge slides

inside the white of the Dutch oven, first

the warm bubbles snuggling then the scrub down

the red deep smooth sides of the empty supper pot, it’s like

a lesson in perception. Know your colors. Reconcile yourself.

 

The house smells like candles. “It’s my birthday!” I say.

It’s not. My birthday over, nothing left to celebrate, I rinse the pot, heave it

back on the stove, sweet mint lingers in the corner of my mouth,

water swirls clear of the drain. I hold close the damp dish cloth.

I’m not a sign language interpreter for the UN, which Grandma Adele

suggested over lunch at Neiman’s was better than teaching

community college crazies. I have never hosted a B’Nai Brith luncheon for fifty or flown to Timbuktu.

 

Every childhood morning my mother

scrubbed burnt oatmeal off the bottom of the pan.

At work she slipped her hand in a puppet, hid behind a felt curtain,

made the crocodile cackle.

Contributor
Deborah Bacharach

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, essays and reviews have been published in Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review, Vallum, Cimarron Review, New Letters and Poet Lore among many others.

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