Breadcrumb #381

MONIQUE QUINTANA

There’s a beehive in the doorframe of our laundry room. I imagine the honeycomb like menudo tripe, not golden, but burning and hot and red. The laundry room has lost its pulse in our little green courtyard. We watch it empty from our apartment windows. We have to walk two blocks to do our wash and dry. We tug our dresses at our feet in pillowcases and carry yellowed towels in baskets at our hips. 

*

I slash brown on my mouth as we wait for our polka dots and stripes to dry and watch him fold his khakis and shirts. I sting him with my eyes and he reciprocates. The dryers whir and stop and whir and stop.  

* 

We feel his shadow fall and catch and fall and catch. Our baskets and sacks make their own shadows on the sidewalk, our earbuds hang around our necks, our hair frizzing from heat. I walk in front, my basket on my head, wires knotting my curls, sugar sticky crystals my mouth. We are home, in the trees and the clouds and the sun, the hive set free, thousands of beads, furry and fat and shiny then black, strand his wrists and his eyes and his stomach and our dresses dance on the grass and fall and hum and fall and hum.

• • •