Grace Anne Anderson

Pas de Deux: Doing Dishes

You load. I rinse. You don’t
     like to touch the wet sponge and I can’t stomach

the bits of wet food in the sink trap.
     You go behind me and clean the drain, while I leave 

the burnt bits of the ceramic Dutch oven for you
     to scrape. When I hand you dishes too fast, 

you tell me to slow down so you can arrange
     them tightly in the dishwasher like the puzzle

of traffic-jammed toy cars called rush hour
     I used to solve as a child, wondering 

how they could all fit.
     The trick to get the car out 

required moving the other vehicles in
     small but decisive twelve-point turns. 

I wasn’t good at the puzzle
     but you would have been. 

We could wash the plates on our own, as we did before,
     but then why would we be here together? 

The dishwasher purrs. If interrupted
     mid cycle, the heat escapes and the steam

settles into the rims of bowls.
     On hardwood, drops of dish 

water pool like the puddle
     of oil on the garage floor 

visible after you pull away, leaving
     a stain.

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Grace Anne Anderson is an educator and dancer living in Spokane, WA, where she recently completed her MFA at Eastern Washington University and served as poetry editor for Willow Springs Magazine. Her poems can be found on Spokane's Public Radio and forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and The Ekphrastic Review.