Lucy cleans for eight hours

Lizzie derksen

I take two Ativan and put on an apron.
It’s nine am, I’m home alone,
I am boiling over like a pot of pasta water,
and my date is finally gone.

The plan is to dissipate my life force
with a few swipes of the broom, then
squander my creative energy cleaning the toilet.

You’d better believe I didn’t come.

Meanwhile, housework feels erotic because
it reduces me to a useful object.

Meanwhile, the buzzer. Rachel says
they’re coming up.

She says there is no fecundity
in the sterile home, and Susan says
the statement is redundant. Yes,
Rachel says, but Lucy is an artist.

Except when I’m a robot vacuum,
scuttling around, sucking.
Either way, I sure like to perform! Meanwhile,
Rachel has never touched a dick in her life.

She has Susan,
who calls her My gold star.

Good for them. Pause and let me
empty a bucket of mop water
in my omniscient aunts’ direction.
Meanwhile, my mother

was a terrible housekeeper. My mother
wasn’t a real person. My mother

didn’t get fucked. Well, Rachel says, she did,
at least once.

Susan glares, licks her pinky,
and writes something
on the mirror I am about to dust. The point
is this housework equals love
connection. The point, she says,
is that I am making a bid for affection.

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Lizzie Derksen is a writer and filmmaker from Treaty 6 Territory. She writes poems about Aunt Rachel, Rachel’s wife Susan, and their niece Lucy. She writes prose about the priest class, the worker class, and her childhood spent in a religious community in southern Saskatchewan.

Lizzie has published poems in earlier issues of Funicular and you can read more ‘Aunt Rachel’ poems by her on the Funicular website all this week. You can purchase her chapbook Aunt Rachel Says 13 Poems here.

Read Lizzie’s Funicular Five where she talks with us more about her Aunt Rachel poems here.

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