Mia Sitterson
I’ll tell you the most Cuban thing about me:
when I was six, I fell in love with ironing clothes, with taking
what is messy and making it neat, with holding something hot
and heavy and taking great care not to hurt myself
I tell my American friends I cannot be their roommate
because I was raised believing cleanliness is next to godliness
they look at me with pity, like of course I lament this sad, false
moral claim, like of course I would be more liberated without it
I mean cleanliness is next to godliness as in: a dishrag can render you
omnipotent, as in: when you hold an iron, you possess the magic
to make something as it ought to be, to make it just right,
to transform an unsettling question into an answer
Some newer friends go through my drawers one night while I am showering,
exhausted, so that they can present me with pajamas,
tuck me into bed, make my life easier, and when they do,
they gasp at all the tidy open mouths
Doesn’t that take you a long time? I shrug, doesn’t laundry
always take a long time? this is the only way I know how to do
a simple task: meticulously, fastidiously, scrupulously
poems aren’t supposed to contain this many adverbs
but these are good words, and I’m glad they exist
I’ll think of an image too — when your city is occupied and a vague, continuous
beeping noise which may be in your head or may be in your neighbor’s
real home follows you around, and every baby you take care of is cutting
teeth, gnawing on the inside of your upper arm, crying out in their sleep
Even then there is a laminate dresser perched in the corner of your world
and you are absolutely certain, because you are the only one who knows
and touches this dresser, that everything inside it makes perfect sense
If only I could color-code my thoughts and hang them from a dark closet
if only I could take a nagging feeling and spray and scrub
what I’m saying is: right there, nestled in the space between
what I can control and what I can’t, there lives some kind of god
I am often praying with a flattening
I am often praying with a fold
—
Mia Sitterson is a postpartum doula and dancer moving and grooving in Washington, DC. Her poetry finds roots in her queer, Jewish, Cuban-American body. For the last six years, she has run a biweekly poetry group out of her living room; over two hundred people have written poems in this space.