Laundry

By Bruce Smith b. 1946 Bruce Smith

Not even the cops who can do anything could do this—

work on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean

laundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this,

in a truck that wasn’t even our own,

part ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything

we couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love,

vomit and shit and the stains of pissing

another week’s salary away, we picked up and drove

to the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin

Bolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty

speech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin,

better than decadent capitalism. And oh, we

could deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city

that said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money.

Source: Silver and Information (1985)

Biography

Originally from Philadelphia, Bruce Smith is the author of several books of poems, including The Other Lover (2000), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Influenced by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Smith’s poetry moves like jazz, incorporating images and narratives into a startling, musically unified whole. In a 2007 interview, Smith explained his poetry’s aspiration to song: “When the language . . .

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