Stations of the Cross
Do not anger the domestic goddess.
Ora et labora.
Her nave is a mirror
that refuses to hold the shadow
or a footprint,
the bedroom carpet
a field of unblemished snow
vanquished weekly
by the Hoover god of destruction.
She is only safe when
the salt and pepper shakers
are aligned on the cherry wood altar–
Scarlet swiss guards,
perfect porcelain sentries.
She wields the Windex bottle
like the priest’s aspergillum,
and anoints the windowsills
with lemon chrism–
every smudge a black transgression.
The tea towels wait
to be ironed into a hiss of silence,
compressed into a memory of starch
and placed into the cedar Reliquarium.
That last speck of dust
is a persistent ghost.
From dust we came,
to dust we return.
She kneels weekly at the basin,
to scrub the white toilet
and flush her sin into the earth.
*
Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize and is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee. Look for her published and forthcoming poems and essays in ONE ART, SWWIM, The Eunoia Review, The New York Quarterly, Rust and Moth, As It Ought to Be, and Anti-Heroin Chic, as well as the anthologies Fast Famous Women, Fast Fallen Women, and Fast Forbidden Women (Woodhall Press). If you meet her, be sure to ask about her cats, Sylvia and Charles.
As a recovering Catholic, this one grabbed me!
I like the subtlety of this, its undercurrent of vulnerability- – “she is only safe when …”
I feel I have known such people.