ONE POEM BY ASHLEY GILLAnD

“WHY A LAUNDROMAT?”

Laundry tosses and turns like my restless corpse before the show. Would my anxieties be a load

of reds? Or darks? Or the mixed sets that leak colors from new garments onto each other,

sloshing and staining and staring out as you’re too late?

The answer is obvious, the acoustics.

The aesthetic appeal is secondary. There’s nothing quite like the rustle of strangers shuffling

fabric, the soft rotation of artificial ponds. Nothing quite like the barely perceptible glow of neon

signs across the street, mostly shrouded by the rich nighttime opacity of your mirrored reflection

in the glass door.

I’ve sung in stairwells, I’ve tunneled beneath the highway to the echoing chamber of glass

bottles and graffiti and sent my voice down one end in hopes of escaping the other. I’ve climbed

a tree whose branches fragmented my song, the rest absorbed into the wood, and heavy with my

secrets, the tree fell and didn’t make a sound. Next door is the second tallest skyscraper in the

city where I cast my voice out halfway up the flights to the top. It booms and twinkles and

thunders and shimmers, up forever and down further. Its journey is so distant that I harmonize

atop myself, a chorus which grows too large for my small ears and flees for larger bodies like the

exoplanets above the bravest window washers and the core of the earth beneath the shaft.

Even then, no live performance has been as successful as in the natural cycle of a laundromat.

I usually set up a few of my own lights, nothing too flashy. Too transformed, and you raise

expectations. People expect flyers, permits, hashtags to reference. I nestle into a nice corner with

the unclaimed delicates and a fluffy terrain of lint. My Christmas lights dangle precariously by

the outlets. They light the clouds of dust more fully, and if I look at it right, it’s both the ground

and the sky. My microphone plugs into my amplifier, the size of a cereal box. Perched on the

back counter, I’m on a swing in a starry night, a mysterious ghost ailing the city with wounded

calls pulled deep from the ocean or rainforest or red-dusted desert. 

My synthesizer stretches across my lap like a stubborn cat. No one is impressed at the individual

layers until the looping begins. The winds, then its whistles, then the creak of the trees and the

rustle of leaves. The skitter of rabbits, the patter of rain, the crickets and hums of the shifting

terrain. I sing over them in dissonant vowels that rarely resemble real language, and it echoes

coolly across the walls like a sterile and domestic cave. People usually stare a few seconds

before returning to their task, realizing nothing theatrical is coming. I am just a part of the

building, not a member of the public to wait out.

Have I ever done a load while performing?

...Does that matter?

Actually, yes. All socks. For my microphone covers.

Ashley Gilland is a writer, musician, and multimedia artist from Missouri. Her work is published or forthcoming in Dishsoap Quarterly,  Haven Speculative, Patchwork Lit Mag, and KALEIDOSCOPED MAG, among others. When not writing poetry and philosophical flash fiction, she also loves composing music and embroidering mixed media art projects. Find her music on Spotify and Bandcamp, her art on Instagram and Etsy (@pocketsnailart), and her tweets at @earlgreysnail.