Washed
By Michelle Askin



5PM dusk when everything blurs here in West Falls Church:
flurries & the last pink blossoms fleeing dogwoods
that let loose the yuppies and now shelter brick row homes
of Middle Eastern and Hispanic districts. Everything blurs:
the throat like groans of engines and the unemployed
rapping by the Grocery Mart: Theythey nunchak it.
No no why they don’t give a…. they don’t give a …
they they they nunchak it, while one of the junkies
flashes pictures with his fingers at a metro shuttle
and yells, Yeh it’s the fucken bus paparazzi.
Then goes on to me how I should wear a red dress.
That the most beautiful woman he ever saw
was in a hallucination while tripping on crystal
in 1991, that she wore red, and I am her.
I cry—it’s the kindest thing anyone’s said to me in years
because you haven’t been around in forever,
and because I know I am hardly beautiful
standing here by a brown Honda, I may or may not have hit.
And I am thinking I really should listen to my therapist
and go on a mild dose for my slight OCD.
You would have said I’m fine just as I am,
but I’m learning there are things that go beyond fine
and a note I leave might only lead to a misunderstanding,
a cop bringing emergency to my door, someone
who could not read my words, only my number,
my name, my I hurt what belonged to you.
So I will wait and offer all the little I have to a woman
in a sari as blue as this winter beginning.
She’ll say 10,000 then laugh, tell me nothing is wrong
with the car. She’ll let my wrist swim in the snow
of her palms, as though blessing me with dove feathers or
a rice meal offering. Again and again, her everything’s all right—
as though not knowing how I’ve hurt my life.

Michelle Askin's poems have appeared in Shaking Like A Mountain, Oranges & Sardines, PANK, The Oyez Review, and elsewhere. She currently resides in the Washington D.C metropolitan area.

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