The Poetry Reading in a Laundromat
Spin cycles for percussion, strangers for audience, detergent for ambience.
The open mic was double booked, the backup café had flooded, and that is how eleven poets ended up performing between a change machine and a bulletin board advertising a lost parrot named Steve.
I want to be clear that the laundromat was not a creative choice. It was a surrender. Priya, who organizes our monthly reading with the energy of a wartime general, had spent the afternoon calling every venue in the neighborhood, and the only person who said yes was Mr. Okafor, who owns the twenty-four-hour laundromat on Delancey and who agreed on two conditions: nobody touches the dryers mid-cycle, and he gets to read one poem.
"You write poems?" Priya asked.
"Everyone writes poems," Mr. Okafor said, wiping down a folding table. "Most people just don't admit it."
We should have put that on the flyer. Instead the flyer said POETRY TONIGHT, 8 PM, BRING QUARTERS, which Priya taped to the window an hour before start time, which is why our audience consisted of the poets themselves, two teenagers sharing headphones, a man in scrubs asleep against a washer, and a woman named Doreen who had come to do her towels and made it very clear she was staying for the towels, not for us.
City life teaches you to perform indifference. Everyone in that laundromat was fluent in it. The unspoken contract of a shared urban space is that we will all pretend the others are furniture, warm furniture that occasionally sighs.
Poetry breaks that contract. That is the whole crime of it.
The first reader was Marcus, who does poems about his ex and his houseplants, in that order of grief. He stood next to a spin cycle that hit its final shudder exactly as he reached his big line, and the machine punctuated his heartbreak with a sound like applause from a robot, and everybody laughed, including Marcus, which was the first time I had seen him laugh during that poem in four months of readings.
Something loosened after that.
The teenagers took out one earbud each, which in teenager is a standing ovation. The man in scrubs woke up, listened to two poems with his eyes closed, and said "again" after the second one, so Aisha read it again. Nobody says "again" at proper readings. At proper readings we murmur and snap. "Again" is what you say when a thing has actually gone through you.
Doreen folded her towels through the first five poets with the pointed diligence of a juror determined not to be moved.
Then Priya read her poem about her mother's hands in flour, and I watched Doreen's folding slow... and slow... and stop, one towel held to her chest like something that needed comforting.
Then, at nine sixteen, the block lost power.
Every machine on Delancey went quiet at once. The lights, the dryers, the fluorescent hum you stop hearing until it stops.
Total darkness... total silence, eleven poets and a laundromat holding its breath.
Somebody's phone flashlight came up, then another, and then Mr. Okafor emerged from the back room carrying, and I will swear this on any book you hand me, a shoebox of emergency candles, because he is the kind of man who runs a twenty-four-hour anything and is therefore prepared for the end of the world.
We lit them in bottles, in mugs, in a hubcap Steve the parrot's flyer had been leaning against. And the laundromat, this fluorescent temple of lint and quarters, became a small dark room full of candle flame, and it looked, I am not exaggerating, like a chapel.
"Well," said Mr. Okafor. "My turn."
He read from a page so old it had gone soft at the folds. The poem was about the night shift, about the people who wash their clothes at three in the morning, the nurses and the newly divorced and the ones who cannot sleep, and how he has watched over their laundry for nineteen years like a lighthouse keeper nobody thanks. He read about loneliness the way only a man who has spent two decades watching it fold its own shirts can.
The candles moved. Nobody else did.
Everyone writes poems. Most people just don't admit it, and a city is ten thousand unadmitted poems doing laundry next to each other.
When he finished, Doreen put down her towel, stood up, and asked if anyone could go twice, because she had something... she had been carrying something for a while, and if the lights were going to be out anyway she would rather say it in the dark.
It was about her husband. Past tense.
Fourteen lines she had clearly worked on alone, at a kitchen table, for a long time, with nobody to tell her they were good.
They were good... they were better than good, they were true, and when she sat down she was shaking, and the man in scrubs reached over and held her hand, a stranger's hand, in a dark laundromat, in a city that trains us never to touch.
The power came back at ten, rude as an alarm clock. The fluorescents slammed on, the machines groaned awake, and we all blinked at each other like people caught in something.
Doreen laughed first. Then everyone.
Here is what happened afterward, because afterward is the part nobody puts on flyers. Priya helped Doreen type up her fourteen lines and post them on a community wall for poets, where strangers who had never met her husband left messages about their own. One of the teenagers, the quiet one, turned out to have a notebook full of verses about his walk to school, and Priya, who collects unpublished people the way other organizers collect email addresses, got him featured among profiles of writers nobody had heard yet. He showed Mr. Okafor the page on his phone. Mr. Okafor printed it out and taped it to the bulletin board, next to Steve.
And Mr. Okafor himself, after nineteen years of reading his night shift poem to nobody, let us talk him into entering it in a monthly poetry contest. He typed it with two fingers, muttering that this was foolishness, that poems belong to the person who needs them. It placed third. The certificate hangs above the change machine, slightly crooked, laminated against steam.
We read at the laundromat every month now. Mr. Okafor waives the folding table fee. Doreen brings biscuits and reads something new each time, always fourteen lines, always him. The man in scrubs comes when his shifts allow and still says "again" when a poem earns it, and it has become the only review any of us wants.
People ask why we don't move somewhere nicer, somewhere with a stage and a sound system and chairs that match. They are missing the point so completely that I have stopped explaining.
The point is Doreen's towel, held to a chest.
The point is a room where the furniture turned out to be people.
The point is that some nights, when a dryer finishes mid-poem and the machines fall silent one by one, the whole place remembers the blackout, and somebody, without a word, reaches into the shoebox under the counter and lights a candle anyway.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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