Laundrette by Liz Lochhead

We sit nebulous in steam

It calms the air and makes the windows stream

rippling the hinterland's big houses to a blur

of bedsits - not a patch on what they were before.

We stuff the tub, jam money in the slot

sit back on the rickle chairs not

reading. The paperbacks in n our pockets curl.

Our eyes are riverted. Our own colours whirl.

We pour in smithereens of soap. The machines sobs

through its cycle. The rhythm throbs

and changes. Suds drool and slobber in the churn.

Our duds don't know which way to turn.

The dark shoves one man in,

lugging a bundle like a wandering Jew. Linen

washed in public here.

We let out of the bag who we are.

This young wife has a fine stack of sheets, each pair

present. She admires their clean cut air

of colour schemes and being chosen. Are the dyes fast?

This christening lather will be the first test.

This woman is deadpan before the rinse and sluice

of the family in a bagwash. Let them stew in their juice

to a final fankle, twisted, wrung out into rope,

hard to unravel. She sees a kaleidoscope

For her to narrow her eyes and blow smoke at, his overalls

and pants ballooning, tangling with her smalls

and the teeshirts skinned from her wriggling son.

She has a weather eye for what might shrink or run.

This dour man does for himself. Before him,

half lost, his small possessions swim.

Cast off, random

they nose and nudge the porthole glass like flotsam

I've found this poem very striking in relation to the research I have been doing in community and collective care and its relationship to self care. This poem is a stark reality for a lot of spaces that should be hubs of community but have fallen in to disrepair and have low morale. It describes the opposite of the kind of laundrette spaces I've been thinking about that could be possible but it also highlights a lot of the conversations I have been having with older south asian women about the individualism of "community' and the hopelessness - especially in times of lockdown. 

A gloomy poem that takes place in a cold Glaswegian laundrette.  No sense of community, just a sad individualism. Each person in the laundrette seems to be in their own world where things just dont change. The poem talks about a place that has fallen into disrepair and isolation and hints towards gentrification and city that was once more vibrant and full of life. The people, the laundrette and the machines all seem very hopeless.