STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
MARGARET E. GILLIO
Time measured in cups of coffee is time
wasted. I am lost in the pantry. Coffee brews. Laundry
churns, meaning it’s Wednesday. Downstairs,
the washer chimes. Cat scratches the screen
open, and we trail out into grassy sunlight.
Forget coffee and laundry. Forget
blank pages cluttered with half-forgotten
musings. What a waste of time!
First words break into lines, then, May sunlight.
I recall it’s Wednesday and Wednesday means laundry.
Laundry makes Wednesday special. The screen
gapes open. I shut it, trapping Cat in sunlight, go downstairs.
My eyes glaze with routine. The stairs
suspend me between problem and solution. I forget
why I went into the dark. Cloth masks do little to screen
us from harm. Still, I wash them. Time
suspends, twisting before into after, laundry
left to dry in May’s miraculous sunlight.
I hate writers who feel words, like sunlight,
streaming onto their willing pages. I climb stairs
and leave the basket in the living room. Laundry
lying in wait. Someone searching for socks will forget
themselves, fall to folding while I sneak back in time,
to do as much nothing as possible. My laptop screen
flashes with bright, hot, overpriced garbage. The screen
reflects me back at me. I wonder why I sat down. Sunlight
unfolds fresh, never-thought ideas. I must write! Time
is up. The stove timer beep-beeps. I shout downstairs
to stir the child from his Minecraft world. He forgets
he can’t eat digital bread, resents the Land of Laundry.
Numbness replaces the need to fold laundry.
I study a panicked fly on the screen.
Nothing complicated. Think. Then forget.
I write clouds as they cover sunlight.
My poetry stops. I lose myself on the stairs
It’s not safe. Not when time doesn’t obey time.
Another week of sunlight and laundry
strung between screens and stairs.
Memory is as porous as time. I’ll soon forget.
Margaret E. Gillio directs the creative writing program at SUNY Finger Lakes Community College, Canandaigua, NY. Her fiction and poetry has recently appeared in The Bookend's Review, Fiction on the Web, and The Ignatian Literary Review.
