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Since 1996 Volume XXI Paola Corso Paola Corso’s fiction and poetry are set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mill. . Her writing honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. Corso’s new poetry books are The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the 2012 Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing, and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, featuring Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and in sweatshops today. A lecturer in Chatham University’s Low-Residency MFA Program, Corso lives in New York City. More info at http://www.paolacorso.com/ The Laundress Catches Her Breath
She swore off cigarettes, thinking the cost of the cartons she’d save every week would be enough
money to rent a room, move out of her father’s house. But then Stubby cut her hours
again and the Maytag suds saver broke the same day. She was right in the middle
of a rinse when gray recycled water flooded the garage floor. She kicked the machine square in the gut,
didn’t care what her father said about conserving water, didn’t care that they had had that machine for as long as
she’s been driving—her aunt was right to use clean water and not a suds saver. They stopped
making them in 2001, which told her something. She kicked it again and rescued her clothes out
of the filthy water. Before she could mop the floor, her father came back from church, drove his four-door
sedan halfway into the garage. He saw a dirty river run toward his new whitewall tires, slammed
the brakes, got out, grabbed her clothes, and threw them on the ground to soak up
the water. The sight sent her out the door for a smoke, though she told her dad she was going
to call a repairman. She ran to her car parked up the street, got in and rolled up the windows
so she could inhale through her mouth and nose as if sitting in the chambers of her lungs.
Paola Corso - The Laundress Catches Her Breath (CavanKerry Press, 2012)
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Copyright, Paola Corso. |