The Laundromat by Jaia Bashir

Coin-feed. Fluorescent vibrating,
a cold sleeping animal. My skirts and pantyhose,

singed wings that died over a black lawn,
all in the drum’s bright cave. The same convex,

plastic cavern where we played in the McDonald’s
and waved to the blank reaches of mothers below,

waving hands salted with fry grease. Look:
the drowned bra, uninhabited for years, lifting now

as though some pale spirit still negotiates its cups;
the leggings thinning to absence. How many frictions

until a garment learns its own erasure? The dryer
tossing up its cumulus, softening everything we touch,

the way the sea takes glass into itself and returns it—
rounded, obedient, without story. Reputation

does the same. Rumor moves in a slow orbit,
erosive, tidal. A man is unmade by repetition.

What is the measurable decay of harm?
I read about modern cremation. Water instead of flame.

Alkaline hydrolysis. The tank rocks,
the way a mother rocks and breastfeeds a child

through a storm, the way a ferry rocks as it trusts
the harbor. The body is placed into a vat, turned, liquefied—

in the metallic vessel, churned, churned, churned.
The body transformed into a green-brown liquid

culture, and the bones reduction crushable by hand
like moth wings. I open the dryer.

Jaia Hamid Bashir, the daughter of Pakistani immigrant artists, is the author of The Afterlife of Sweetness (Ohio State University Press, 2026) and the chapbook Desire/Halves (Nine Syllables, 2024). Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Image, The Rumpus, The Oxonian Review, and Narrative.

31 August 2026