The Cleaning Lady - In Response to John Yau's "January 18, 1979"
Anda Totoreanu

My mother’s hands
were always cold
she used to startle me
on the off – times when she
felt it was ok to love me

She would scrub and scrub
like Lady Macbeth
wallowing in her tears
drowning again the unborn child
she said she’d killed.

For a while she scrubbed
the bathroom floor until the day
the black and white tile broke
and she fell through the cracks

She never knew she was loved
the way she was
until she became what she wasn’t
and what she is now
is colder than the ice my
17-year-old brother
drops into his Smirnoff.

About the Author: Anda Totoreanu is a University of Oxford ('16) and Lafayette College ('15) grad, born in Romania but raised in North Carolina. She believes that resistance requires deep introspection and patience. The poem above speaks of her difficult upbringing as a child in an immigrant family who dealt with many external and internal obstacles. She believes life gives you the chance recreate yourself, to find your own light when everything around you seems dark.

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