Writers Air Poetic Laundry at Laundromat

Alone in the basement,/I take off my pajama bottoms/and slide warm denim/(CLINK CLINK CLINK)/from the dryer over my thighs.

As poet January O'Neil reads, 50 listeners listen and one laundress launders. O'Neil muses on life at 42 while the woman standing behind her slides quarters into the coin slot of a big silver dryer. Clink. Clink. Clink.

The deep thrum of giant machines spinning jeans and socks and T-shirts underlines the rest of O'Neil's poem, "Denim," and the pieces read by a rough dozen other poets. In lieu of a program, their names are affixed on pillowcases hanging on a clothesline above the podium and below the large, stainless steel tube running across the ceiling. The room glows fluorescent and smells faintly of powdered detergent.

The poets and their audience, sitting next to driers or leaning up against washers, are gathered at the Salem Laundry Co. in Beverly, Mass., for the third reading in the Improbable Places Poetry Tour.

Series creator Colleen Michaels directs the writing center at Montserrat College of Art, located in the same neighborhood as the laundromat and the YMCA swimming pool that hosted January's reading.

"The first one was at Centraal Cycle, a bike shop," she said. "That was great because we had great support from the bike shop, and they had a lot of cyclists in who were probably at their first poetry reading, and we had a lot of poets who showed up that were probably at their first bike shop."

The series marries town and gown, and, Michaels hopes, makes new poetry appreciators out of folks who thought they were heading out for a mundane but productive night at the laundromat (or the bike shop or the pool or, next month, the florist).

"It could be a surprise for some of the laundry doers," Michaels told AOL News. "I hope that they see it as great entertainment for them, a chance to watch something more than the spin cycle."

Poets come to the series from Montserrat, neighboring colleges and the community. For each event, they tailor their words to the theme. Laundry provoked poems about a cheating husband laundering his shirt, a child helping her mother hang wet clothes and a baby sitter sneaking into her employer's closet to try on couture.

Writer Dawn Paul, Montserrat instructor and author of the novel "The Country of Loneliness," attended last month's swimming pool reading. Prone to fictional prose, she was not only inspired to wade into poetry, but to do so wearing a wetsuit.

"I'm not any kind of performance poet," she told AOL News. "But when I had this opportunity to use this swimming pool, I was thinking of a story that I've always wanted to tell, the story about my mother teaching me how to swim, and the bigger story behind that, which is why she didn't swim.

"It was very exciting to do something off the top of my head. In all of the different readings I've participated in, I've never felt that kind of freedom to bust in and do something totally different."

Paul said the series addresses a long-held quandary.

"People talk about, How do we get more people involved in poetry? How do we make it accessible without dumbing it down? People are concentrating on the poetry itself. I think a lot of it just is, How is it being presented?

"When you hold a poetry reading in a bike shop or a laundromat, it breaks all of that down. It makes everybody feel like, I can go to a laundromat, for God's sake!"

The next Improbable Places reading takes place in March at a flower shop, with spring looming.

The full text of January O'Neill's poem "Denim" runs below. To maximize your reading experience, sit next to a humming dryer.

Alone in the basement,
I take off my pajama bottoms
and slide warm denim
from the dryer over my thighs.
They unfurl like a blue flag
tighter than I remember,
hanging lower and snugger
around my hips than before.
This is how 42 feels: authentic,
comfortable, dangerously curvy,
a little distressed along the pockets.
I run my hands over the weft and weave
smooth the creases over the inseam,
that junction between the invisible and visible
at the intersection of the crotch.
The long cursive of my legs
is my signature. Blessed be
the soap and hard water
makes it all come clean.
Like fallen halos,
the white rings of traveling salt
from snow-laced streets
once around my cuffs
tumble away in turbulence,
my past sins absolved.
Everything smells April fresh,
of mountain breezes and waterfalls.
My body retrofits to these
blue fields of grooves and furrows,
and the selvage that never fades.

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