She brings me home
a brand-new vacuum cleaner,
and it clatters hard
on the wide plank floors.
The back-and-forth pass (and pass
and push) plasters pink
and sweat on my skin,
under my shirt. My back hurts,
but there’s just one room
left to bluster through.
I do this every week, and
every week it’s new.
Every week I ask
the space behind my eyes, “Why?”
And it says, “For her.”
Laura S. Marshall is a writer and editor who lives in New England. She studied linguistics as an undergraduate at Queen’s University in Canada and as a grad student at the University of British Columbia. She has studied writing at the Ashbery Home School, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst, and the College of Our Lady of the Elms. Her work appears or is forthcoming in literary publications including Epigraph Magazine, Lavender Review, Junoesq, and the Queen’s Feminist Review, as well as newspapers and trade magazines.
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