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. |
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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.