Week 3: Improv' 1

Ashley Warner's "Laundry"

That year, while scrubbing what she called the filth
off my laced collar affair, my Sunday best, my mother
found my period. Just like that, I became a woman.
Thank God I stopped liking myself that day before.
Or the day before. True, with the sting of detergent
on the clothesline mother and I built in our backyard,
I stayed on, passing her pins to hang my dresses.
Sometimes, the ghosts of them would drift, reds and whites,
sleeves stretching each year, as if trying to regain themselves,
as if touching the ground again were an act of faith, clean, neat:
some necessary return to some inevitable void.

My improv' : Diary

That foggy-gray funnel-cloud morning, while twirling up debris
from my barren Berber Cut-Pile plushy carpet, mother pushes her
machine further under-neath the bed. The vaccume, sucking up prey
using its long pipe-like snout, its small mouth to quench the thirst like a sea
dragon, lips the corner- it begins to choke, and the air-way draws together:
unable to regurgitate the foreign taste, mother's back bends mathematically,
her fingers finger between the teeth bristles and the quivering leafy corner
of Pandora's box. Ripping edges, red leaks out of a crevice somewhere
on my mother's finger, unforgiving bleeding seeps through and runs to wash
clean the black stabs left by my sword. White knuckles tear her prey from my
predator, mother peals back the skin-my Sunday sin-My Eyes Only engraved
in red on its cover.Undressing me, dark brown eyes absorb colors of spring
green, autumn orange, and winter blue-I'm a seasonal junkie. My mother found
my diary. Scanning the curves, the loopty-loops and dance of each word jars,
jerks too fast for mother's crippled, right cataract eye. Just like that, I became
exposed: awkwardly naked, unsymmetrical and uneven before her.