Ironing, a Litany
 
                                    “to do this ministry one needs to have a washer,
                                      ironing board and steam iron.” --Holy Cross Bulletin, May 2014

Blessed be those who have

Blessed be their coffee and cream their smell of steam behind the scene work of women their clean white kitchens their all manners of clotheslines

Blessed be the unhurried and the ironing

Blessed be the Online History of Ironing  (see: Ironing, 1950s, drudgery) 

Blessed be the Treatise on Domestic Economy, 1842, the bosom board on which to iron shirt bosoms … one foot and a half long and nine inches wide, and covered with white flannel

Blessed be as soon as school was out in summer 1967, iron/fold/iron/fold/iron now the size of your
father’s pocket quarter-fold stack a week’s supply and the I’ve been saving these for you for a month and the but why do they need to be flat when they’ll just get messed up again

Blessed be the reasons why

Blessed be Permanent Press
                 No-Iron
                 Wash ‘n Wear
                 Durable Easy-Care
                 Wrinkle-Resistant
                 Blessed be Dacron & Polyester
                 and the mysteries of Brooksweave    
                  
Blessed be learning to sew and iron open the seams and me on the chair my mother with pins in her mouth asking how short and pinning 3 inches longer than I said anyway

Blessed be the smell of steam and scorch and starch and press

Blessed be Mary ironing in order for next day church pressing first buttonhole placket sleeve length smooth yoke side seams shirttail collar last

Blessed be Christina of Virginia who survived a Black and Decker Digital and wrote (without punctuation) I was ironing yesterday I walked out of the room I heard a popping at the first I thought it was normal I came back to the room the iron was fire all the handle and inside melted I unplugged

Blessed be the buttoning up
                      buttoning down
                      unbuttoning of
                      the holy and crisp
                      unwrinkled white Oxford

Blessed be My Perpetual Birthday List: 
                                                             White Blouse
                                                              Full Size Ironing Board
                                                              Rowenta Model #D9080 Steam Iron for $175
                                                              (but make it last for more than a year) 
                                                              Cotton Clothes
                                                              White Blouse
                                                              More Time

Blessed be the Chosen Catholic Ironers of the Holy Cross and the un-Chosen un-Catholic who want to take the Purificator and the Corporal home and would convert to smooth them out on a Full Size 

Blessed be the pile to be done 

Blessed be all who iron and pray for the world to be flat once more   

—Published in The New Guard

Epilogue

it was early November
and three small girls walked along
the receding tide
reciting
she sells seashells by the seashore
reciting as if
it was a brand new sentence
as if the spinning world
and its waves
going out and out and in
were something that began
just then
and the sky spun yellow
brilliant and mango peach
and then blue
and bluer and
then that last darkest
blue before night
down beach
the downbeach people
were reinventing flight:
sending paper lanterns off to sea
tiny hot air balloons
fueled by fire and match lit wishes
Let’s you and me reinvent a seashell shop, she said
Sure, I said
the wheel, the waves, the way it turns

Lighthouse Knot

Tell me a fairy tale, enchanter
Have I told you the one with the lighthouse in it?
They all have a lighthouse.
No, listen. The first time they met they had a map in their hands
and didn’t know it.
If it were up to me, one of them said, life would be wallpapered with maps.
Later, they got in a car and drove to a field marked with coordinates.
Who were they?
Just listen. After dark they completely stumbled on a distant planet.
When no one was looking they gave each other the innermost ring.
They made up names for the seven moons and said if it were up to me
I’d give you half of the fifth moon.
Legend and all that.
And if it were up to me, I’d scrawl a map to my heart and give you
the rights.
The lighthouse, it’s abandoned (might, we?)
I wonder who lived here a hundred years ago
A lighthouse keeper: maybe, and/or/but is there a way to keep light?
No, it’s made of waves and waves are not dependable.
Are there waves at the bottom of the sea?
Only shadows
lighthouse knot: for securing the
lighthouse: to the shore
let: me show you

O Lord, open thou our lips

light is so much more
with clouds

I walk alone

and
why anyone would want to speak

to interrupt
the wind

it isn’t my place
to say 

enough
to watch
the hours

finch on aster

eavesdrop

sift the sky through
for god

If you think you know what Jeanie's poems are like, be prepared for something different. I mean different. Be prepared to meet Violet. She's not your ordinary type of girl.

I’ve loved Violet for years, since reading her first poems. She makes jewelry from dead bugs. Puts chicken hearts in classmates’ valentines. In a perfect world, her universe is drawn by Edward Gorey. She’s like the little girl from The Addams Family—only cooler. Her soundtrack is the stillness after drowning. When Violet’s happiest, her eyes turn black. —Michael Kriesel Winner of North American Review’s 2015 Hearst Award

Violet’s Hearts

Violet was four when her father taught her how to cut valentines out of red and white construction paper and glue them onto lace doilies. They walked to neighbors’ houses, put valentines on the doorstep, rang the bell and ran away. She loved Valentine’s Day. At eight, she started cutting the hearts in less-than-perfect shapes. Sometimes she cut a small tail on top of the heart. She told her father it was the superior vena cava. She had seen it in a book in the attic with pictures of the body. She wondered why he had not told her the real shape of the heart. Whenever her father made chicken for supper, she wanted to hold the heart, run her baby finger inside the ventricles. By the next Valentine’s Day she had saved up enough chicken hearts in the bottom of the freezer for all the kids in her class. She made neat little envelopes with the doilies, stuffed a frozen heart inside each one.

Nature’s Bounty

All summer Violet’s been collecting cicadas. It’s one of the peak years so she’s found a lot of them. Every night she carefully removes the wings and puts them aside. They make good curtains for her emergency room diorama. She’s been stringing the heads on different color threads and is putting them up in her room like a ’60s love-bead curtain. Morning is the best time to gather the ones for eating. The cookbook says the white ones are the tenderest. She made a cicada pie for her father, following the recipe that called for thirty female cicadas. For imitation peanut clusters, sex doesn’t matter. You boil the bodies then roll them in butter and brown sugar. They can be kept in an airtight jar for six months. They’re also a good substitute for chocolate chips, which is what she used for the cookies she and her friend, Ann Louise, made for the school’s Halloween bake sale.
 

Someone Said

Don’t make me climb anything:
sturdy ladder, ivy wall, elevator to the 53rd.
It’s not the shoes, but
something else. I’ll tell you about it later,
after the sun goes down. After the sun leaves you and me
and the graveyard with nothing to hold on to,
not even light.
Come: whisper secret nonsense.
Soft place of an animal’s ears.
Scraps of satin cloth or a newborn’s tears,
saved in a violet vial.
Someone said that someone said
the sadness will go on forever.
Someone said dream of flying.
And someone said it’s not that I’m afraid of heights,
it’s that I’m afraid I’ll jump.

If a whale has a proper name

It is a Tuesday afternoon, late May, and a good year for whales.
A thousand crows patrol the salt marsh.
Whales are large animals. Whales are mammals. Whale is a noun.

This isn’t the problem. The problem is there are two nouns for almost everything in the world. Heart, for
example. Heart is a noun. But take it out of the chest and it beats like want in someone else’s hand. Or,
summer. Summer is a noun, but also an illusion. On any other day, you recall a particular one, and what
comes to you is a handful of blueberries. A walk in the woods is a noun. In the branches, the forest birds are
singing the songs you remember, but backwards. They sing to name the hungers of the world. Hunger is a
noun. The other word for hunger is heart. The heart is hungry for air. A lighthouse is air except for light and loneliness.
A noun is the name of a person, place or thing.

1. Lighthouse was always a name for summer.
2. Sometimes it was Tuesday afternoon.
3. Love was a noun and a thing.
4. Tide, lighthouse, afternoon, sorrow, whale…
5. The look in a whale’s eyes was a thing and there was a word for it.
6. A love story starts anywhere it wants to, even on a Tuesday in May. It’s only proper.

                                                                                             it is called a Proper Noun

It is not all important to find a beginning because

In one beginning there were three nouns: air, breast, arms. These are the first nouns that need no nouns, the first words that can’t be named. The first three wants. It’s like that in this sort of beginning. In another
beginning there was want and longing, but differently. In both beginnings there was a girl. She had an old
faded memory of something happy. There was a lighthouse in the third beginning, but it was occupied, so she started at the second beginning. The first beginning begins before birth, in darkness; a darkness that is warm and safe and never questioned. But then there is light, which forever is. The girl had been born in the
morning at low tide in the Summer of the Whale. She was made out of what came before and what came
before that. She returned to the sea, five Summers of the Whale later. You know the story. The other word
for story is sea.

                                                                                      so far there are four beginnings

Tell me how it starts then

We were what they call in Maine, summer people, or from away. From away is another word for Canada, or Nebraska. She was from Canada and we were both eleven. Her real name was Petra.1 A magnet has a north pole and a south. It knows the word, inseparable, without saying it. We were eleven and she was homesick. I gave her a shell and she put it up to her ear while our fathers picked out lobsters from the large saltwater tank behind the restaurant. We thought lobsters were inseparable from the sea but we were wrong. We were right that spiders defy gravity. They can stay in the same place on a ceiling for weeks. You think gravity would pull them down seeing how it is supposed to keep your feet on the ground. It was a Tuesday, and the only thing that stayed in place was the moon. I called her Pete and she called me Teej.

sadness, don’t say sad
say moon, say orange, say—
the moon is an orange

tonight love, tonight
Aquarius brings water
for us the sky is

an old god in blue
and a boy with an orange
in his coat pocket. 

The Odor of Violets

How a molecule is a group of atoms arranged in a particular way. How these
arrangements of atoms float aimlessly around the world and stick on things
like orange peels and old letters. How you can’t see them even if there are many
together, such as when you pass a bakery early morning and all those loaves
of bread are baking. How eventually many molecules of water will make a drop,
but many molecules of the scent of a violet will not make a violet. And this—if
you shift even one atom in the simple molecule of the odor of a violet, you
might have instead the aroma of a rose, or a rumpled bed sheet. What I mean
to say is—how late last night the smell of your hair came to me out of nowhere,
damn wandering essence, the same way it did that afternoon I kissed you behind
the soft curve of your ear. How it threw into disarray, again, all those molecules
of muscle I had finally set in order in the space beneath my ribs.