Out on the Cape, 1954

My brother’s seersucker shorts
the ones our mother bought through the Sears catalogue
The table cloth, red & white checkered
Blue jeans too thick for the wringer, all rumpled
hanging next to my grey poodle skirt from Aunt Simonne in New York
My sister Robin’s white blouse with lace collar that needed to be ironed
Pillow cases and our father’s handkerchiefs
There were the wool socks, washed by hand
Blue work shirts, buttons that broke when they went through the wringer
How flat the clothes got, pressed by those rollers!
A pink rayon slip with adjustable straps that I felt so grown up to wear
in between — hidden from view, my first bra
the one Barbara Dennis gave me
White gauze diapers by the score, with pinked edges
Long sleeved baby t-shirts with tabs to pin the diapers to
Little sweet pea nightgowns with a draw string on the bottom
telling all just who lived inside
And the wind,
when the wind blew, when it blew all those clothes on that line
the family cloth sung like crazy
And when the frost came around, as it would every winter
those clothes, the lot of them, froze up stiff
and could break in half just by the bending
That’s how brittle everything got
that time of year.