MY VERY OWN CLEANING LADY

I always thought I’d do my own cleaning,

                        never

            forget the working-class way

of Italian American women like my mother who kept

                        a broom

            beside her front door as if it were

a sign that read, “we work hard, we clean hard

                        so wipe

            your damn feet on the welcome mat before 

you step inside.” The broom was a sign that well-off

                        ’mericans

            didn’t understand;  they saw it as clutter

that belonged in a tool shed behind a fence                   

                        in the back

            yard with the snow blower and the leaf blower

and the lawn mower. Then I moved to Brooklyn,

                        bought

            a co-op apartment, had a baby and a contractor who

 skipped town in the middle of renovation. He left me in

                        dirty

            living hell with a nursing newborn,

650 square feet of filth and six ounces of breast milk

                        every four hours,

            dust he knew my own prosperity created

because I could afford  to add on a second bedroom. I was

                        another

            ‘merican in this immigrant’s eyes who’d just pay

to have someone else clean up after him. It was 

                        all I could

            do to take a shower but I ignored signs

in our lobby that advertised “PhDs who clean.” It wasn’t

                        in me

            to hire someone, even a scholar gathering

dust samples for a doctoral thesis.  I still thought

                        money

            would never change hands to get the apartment

clean when my mother came for a visit. She wanted to but

                        didn’t ask

            why not a house in Pittsburgh, why I waited so long

to leave my job and have a baby. She filled a bucket

                        of water,

            scrubbed the floor on her knees one square foot at a time

Payback for all those Saturday mornings I helped her clean. As she

                        rinsed

            her rag and said the contractor’s name in vain,

I rested on the sofa with my son, remembering

                        dust to dust.

EXPRESSED

My father drove 382 miles from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn and didn’t find a parking space. His welcoming was a $60 ticket and sticky sap all over his windshield from the sycamores on our tree-lined street. We moved the car to a legal spot then took a taxi to Home Depot to buy light fixtures and to Home Depot again for a toilet seat because I couldn’t leave a nursing baby for longer than a few hours at a time. After my father hung the ceiling light, he picked up operations instructions for a Purely Yours breast pump. I sat at the kitchen table with my nursing bra flaps down, exposing breasts hard and engorged while he rigged tubing to the machine, set the dial, and handed me the suction cup. When my milk began to sputter into the bottle, he winked and left me with a pitcher of water to drink as I expressed one breast at a time in calibrated dribs and drabs. The room grew dark, but he came back to switch on the ceiling fixture he had just installed. And in his light, my eyes gradually began to adjust to the bold pattern of the newly hung wallpaper, to the full bottle of milk in front of me, waiting to see my cream rise to the top in the freezer before the faint tint of blue.

THE DOCTOR MAKES HIS DIAGNOSIS*

I have two cities but only one home

that is my mother’s womb

with one long umbilical cord

that reaches across thousands

of frequent flyer miles.

I have two apartments and one window

filled with pleats of light

and a sooty curtain

that no matter the color

is a checkered gray.

I have “an abiding devotion” to my birthplace,

so when I go back to Pittsburgh,

I’m stupida for living in Brooklyn

and when I’m living in Brooklyn,

I’m mad with longing.

I have an “afflicted imagination”

that incapacitates my body, causing

nausea, loss of appetite, high fever,

pathological changes in the lungs,

brain inflammation, and cardiac arrest.

I have a “lifeless and haggard countenance,”

an “idleness conducive to daydreaming”

about thick village milk and Iron City beer,

about the sounds of bagpipes and Terrible Towels

whipping in stadium winds.

I have three college degrees and seven bookcases

but rely solely on “associationist magic.”

When I climb the stairs to the torch

of the Statue of Liberty, I imagine being

at the top of an idle factory smokestack.

I have a “highly contagious disease” but curable

if you purge my stomach, induce torture and pain.

I can be ridiculed, laughed out of my homesickness

unless you see me as a working-class woman

who does a white-collar job with blue-collar hands.

*Swiss Doctor Johannes Hofer coined the word “nostalgia” in his 1688 medical dissertation Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia.

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