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Paul Marion
Majestik
Linen
In a subterranean room roaring like a jet,
Sunday workers feed or unload machines,
busy in twos and threes at their stations.
Plain as old-time mill operatives, they handle cloth by the mile:
nursing home pillow cases, dinner napkins, green scrubs from the ER,
loved sheets, double-bleached butchers’ aprons, hotel towels,
well-fed tablecloths from a club luncheon.
The linen workers take it in and send it on—their canvases
unsigned.
A young woman catches my face in the window.
Instead of giving her a wave, any kind of salute,
I freeze like a common eavesdropper.
She turns back to her work, what most of us won’t see
unless we’re in the Flats at the hour of the early Mass,
following the drone of automatic washers
to a sunrise service recognized worldwide.
Their names are in the phone book with ours.
We get the job done. We know the drill by heart.
We press and fold the linen before it is loaded onto trucks,
bound for back doors across the city. |
Paul Marion was born in Lowell,
Massachusetts, in 1954. He has published poetry and essays in journals
and magazines throughout the United States as well as in Canada,
Ireland, England, and Japan, including most recently The Massachusetts
Review, Steak Haché (Montréal), The Acre (Andover,
Mass.), and Sport Literate (Chicago). His writing is included in the
anthologies Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (Southern
Illinois University Press) and For a Living: The Poetry of Work
(University of Illinois Press). He is the author of several collections
of poetry and the editor of Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other
Writings by Jack Kerouac (Viking, 1999/Penguin, 2000). He is co-editor
of The Bridge Review: Merrimack Valley Culture, an online journal at
the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he is director of
community relations. He lives with his wife and son in Lowell
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