Dirty Laundry
By Cynthia Bernard
October 15, 2023
October 15, 2023
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When you hit me,
Daddy, did you aim for my thighs, buttocks, back, belly? Or did you strike out blindly, carried on tsunami waves that were born fathoms deep and traveled far, growing in fury until they broke on the designated shoreline of my body? Where your hand or fist or belt pounded into my very cells that I was bad, bad, bad-- like in ancient times on the morning after a wedding, when the women would pound the sheets against rocks to beat out the stains-- you pounded and you pounded and then you hung me out to dry. |
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Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her late sixties who is finding her voice as a poet after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Multiplicity Magazine, Passager, Writing in a Woman's Voice, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Journal of Radical Wonder, Poetry Breakfast, The Bluebird Word, Your Daily Poem, Persimmon Tree, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere.
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