The sound of my mother’s steam iron
smoothing
a landscape of sheet
while our clothes lay crowded
in their nest of wicker.

She warned us not to touch the iron,
its compression of air
and water,
its engine all hiss and leak.
I saw her as beaten down, then,

the way she hung over
the board, head bowed, shoulders sloped
like Degas’ Women Ironing―
down to
the drunken doppelganger

posing by her side. I know now
how hard the body works to give beauty
its moment in time:
Degas’ dancers, aching
at the barre,

the taut muscles of thoroughbreds waiting
for the sting of the whip.
My mother bent over her iron, pressing
out the past or forcing it
back in the folds.

I watched her once as she picked up
my brother’s shirt, warm as a new laid egg,
and rubbed it against her face,
the iron
cooling, upright on its stand.

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Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections: The Zen Piano-Mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and most recently, Everything Turns Into Something Else, published in 2020 as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. Her more recent awards include the 2020 Joy Harjo Award and the 2021 Naugatuck Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review.

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