the man arrives on roller skates with roses in his teeth, grinning bloody lips

EVERY LAUNDROMAT IN THE WORLD

by Mel Bosworth

Safety Third Enterpries, 2012

40 pages

Near the top of the list of reasons why I like my apartment of three+ years are the washer and dryer machines buzzing happily just a few steps from the front door. Not having to cart pounds of soiled underthings two blocks through rain/snow/piss/PCP addicts only to spend 90 minutes in a sauna-sticky Laundromat reeking of cats and drowned in the palpable-in-any-language cheese of  Mexican soap operas is a constant cause for celebration,  from which some would say I’ve never woken. A reminder that at-home amenities are, well, amenable. Then along comes Mel Bosworth’s Every Laundromat in the World and I’m forced to reconsider (leaving my apartment, not carrying bushels of laundry around the city like a clown). The chapbook’s quietly debilitating short poems provide a surprising and keen succession of small-town observational jabs, building with the subdued rhythmic furor of a double-loaded spin cycle. In a musically minimalist language, Bosworth juxtaposes swathes of superficially unrelated commonplace minutiae – a five-year-old photograph of a man with an ambiguous facial expression, the spontaneous singing of a ditty extolling Spam, a vague beep that sounds like a trash truck but can’t be – imbuing the moments with an appealing emotional newness that often gives way to a foreboding intensity. A calm rain forest evening belies thousands of years of unfortunate current events. A recycling bin invites sublime self-annihilation. Ryan Gosling becomes my and every other consumer’s worst nightmare. Seriously. There’s also a bunch of humorously lighter fare (“It’s always funnier when you / masturbate with your mouth / open”), which, if we’re still going with the extended laundry analogy, which we are, we might say Bosworth mixes all his colors and whites with just the right amount of bleeding. But most importantly, Every Laundromat in the World reminds us to look more deeply into the spiderweb forests of what we so unceremoniously have deemed “the everyday,” to give those webs a healthy twist, to see what happens. Don’t be sorry.