I can smell you still, you know. The laundry has all been folded and rests across the bed in piles of towels, socks and slips, like patches of a quilt I once imagined making from the scraps of things the boys had both outgrown: pieces of a pattern planned, but never basted into form. I can remember when your pile was twice as big as mine from working two jobs, changing twice a day: the first-shift shirts, buttoned down and crushed and stained beneath the arms from sweating under gabardine suits you once said gave a sense of intellect -- enough, at least, to satisfy the waitress looking for a lunch-break paperback or the investment banker wanting poetry. The better stories, not on pages, but laughed out at stand-up dinners as you donned your third-shift overalls for tuna cleaning late-night on the docks: even after soaking for hours in bleach they still sparkled with scales, like sequins on the evening gowns I used to cut from magazines and paste as liners of the bathroom drawers. I liked to press my nose against the cotton, drape a sleeve across my mouth like the Arab women in Life, and wonder why, though they had all been washed together, twisting up inside the same hot water, soaking up the same detergent, my own shirts never smelled like anything but soap, while yours, under that clean, were salt and binding glue, diesel and Vitalis, as if my face were resting soft against your chest and I could taste the essence of you melting on my tongue, and though it has been years since I have been asleep and heard the thump of boots pulled off and dropped, the sigh of overalls shrugged into a pile on the floor, or felt the weight of you arriving late, bouncing the mattress as you pressed and slid your weary muscles up against my naked back, I can still smell you in these sheets and shirts and see the tumbling of the two of us, the toppling of the neatly-folded laundry stretched across the ready bed.
Ali Fischer