The Pillow Cleaners Come to Town

and turn the senior citizen center into an automated assembly line. Goodbye, dross of long winter nights. Farewell, old skin cells and reek: what couldn’t come clean on a clothesline. Bundles of pillows, caroming, bouncing, sloshing along, even as more mistresses of pillows hurry through the door, hugging stained sacks of feathers like thoughts kept well past prime. Sure, they should’ve been thrown out long ago but—we paid so dearly for them.