Industrial Lace poem – Alice Fulton

The city had such pretty clotheslines.

Women aired their intimate apparel

in the emery haze:

membranes of lingerie—

pearl, ruby, copper slips—

their somehow intestinal quivering in the wind.

And Freihofer’s spread the chaste, apron scent

of baking, a sensual net

over a few yards of North Troy.

The city had Niagara

Mohawk bearing down with power and light

and members of the Local

shifting on the line.

They worked on fabrics made from wood and acid,

synthetics that won’t vent.

They pieced the tropics into housecoats

when big prints were the rage.

Dacron gardens twisted on the line

over lots of Queen Anne’s lace.

Sackdresses dyed the sun

as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass

against the leading of the tenements,

the warehouse holding medical supplies.

I waited for my bus by that window of trusses

in Caucasian beige, trying to forget

the pathological inside.

I was thinking of being alive.

I was waiting to open

the amber envelopes of mail at home.

Just as food service workers, counter women,

maybe my Aunt Fran, waited to undo

their perms from the delicate insect meshes

required by The Board of Health.

Aunt Alice wasn’t on this route.

She made brushes and plastics at Tek Hughes—

milk crates of orange

industrial lace

the cartons could drip through.

Once we boarded, the girls from Behr-Manning

put their veins up

and sawed their nails to dust

on files from the plant.

All day, they made abrasives. Garnet paper.

Yes, and rags covered with crushed gems called

garnet cloth.

It was dusk—when aunts and mothers formed

their larval curls

and wrapped their heads in thick brown webs.

It was yesterday—twenty years after

my father’s death,

I found something he had kept.

A packet of lightning-

cut sanding discs, still sealed.

I guess he meant to open the finish,

strip the paint stalled on some grain

and groom the primal gold.

The discs are the rough size

of those cookies the franchises call Homestyle

and label Best Before.

The old cellophane was tough.

But I ripped until I touched

their harsh done crust.

Alice Fulton

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Poems in English 

• Is There A Power That Can Sustain And Cheer by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Invocation To The Earth, February 1816 by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Inside of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Inscriptions Written with a Slate Pencil upon a Stone by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Inscriptions In The Ground Of Coleorton, The Seat Of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., Leicestershire by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Inscriptions For A Seat In The Groves Of Coleorton by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Influence of Natural Objects by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Indignation Of A High-Minded Spaniard by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Incident Characteristic Of A Favorite Dog by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• In The Pass Of Killicranky by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• In Due Observance Of An Ancient Rite by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• I Travelled among Unknown Men by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• I Know an Aged Man Constrained to Dwell by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• I Grieved For Buonaparte by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• How Sweet It Is, When Mother Fancy Rocks by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Hoffer by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Hint From The Mountains For Certain Political Pretenders by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Here Pause: The Poet Claims At Least This Praise by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Her Eyes Are Wild by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Hart-Leap Well by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth

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