Linen Prayers
2024My mother has always refused to buy a dryer.
She let the sun pierce through her laced shirts,
and be condemned by the sound of prayer.
She tells me to trust the hands that came before us.
How her mother would pile the sheets she boiled in the kitchen pot,
ball up her hands to rub them across the wash board until they became red.
She would bring the basket of clothes down from their apartment,
and hang each sock, one by one.
With full trust in her heart that Kharkiv wouldn’t steal her linen prayers.