Impersonations

by Nancy Beadie

If Billy Collins were a woman, or
if I were Billy Collins, we might write
about the ironing I am doing now–

how a good iron has a life of its own
as it noses up the folds of a seam,
fingers a cuff or the hem of a skirt,

then gleefully glides up a woman’s dress
(that’s Billy), or calmly smooths the wrinkles
from a sheet, all the while chortling steam

from the corners of its mouth. But also–
how one can lose oneself in endless reams
of white, like Midwesterners in blinding snow

or polar explorers on a stretch of ice,
an undifferentiated future
and past forever scrolling both forward

and back. And also, how the very act
of standing here—feet planted by the board,
the circling motion of arm and shoulder–

the very posture of standing here–rare
for me–still holds the muscle memory
of my mother, and my mother’s mother—
her heavy flat irons heating on the stove.

Nancy Beadie was born in Schenectady, NY to a GE family with roots in abandoned mill towns of the Mohawk Valley. She grew up in once-industrial northern Indiana, studied history in deindustrialized Syracuse, and ended up in Seattle appreciating life in divergent economies. She’s published poems in Windless Orchard, Southwinds, and Galen Stone Review.