Unravel on the Riverbanks
Cara Waterfall‘s ‘Vessel’ won honourable mention in our 2021 Magpie Award for Poetry. Judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar praised the poem for its “wonderful couplets” and “strong rhythmic pulse,” calling it “a poem of delicate grace.”
We were delighted to publish ‘Vessel’ in Issue 33, Winter 2022. But this is not the first of Cara’s stirring poems to appear in the pages of Pulp: ‘Hummingbird Elegy’, winner of the Editor’s Choice in the 2020 Magpie Award for Poetry, appears in Issue 28, Autumn 2020.
Cara has kindly gifted us with another of her fabulous pieces, and we are thrilled to share it with you. Here’s what she told us about ‘Laundryman Haibun’: “When I lived in Côte d’Ivoire, I visited Parc Banco in northern Abidjan, where hundreds of people do laundry in the river, earning a pittance for their work. They are called Fanicos, a combination of the Dyula, or Jula, words fani, which means ‘fabric’ or ‘clothes’, and ko, which means ‘to wash’. Although the scene unfolds like a technicolour dream, the reality is that many of these people are immigrants, who are doing whatever they can to support their families.”
Laundryman Haibun
Attécoubé, Côte d’Ivoire
Hoist laundry on your head. Walk eight kilometres in the still-dark. Unravel on the riverbanks of Banco Forest. Glove hands in bags, thin as gauze. Herd garments to station — stack of sand-filled tires with slabs of rock atop. Soak each piece. Scrub with soap. Beat against stone. Soak. Scrub. Beat. Repeat. Soak. Scrub. Beat. Repeat. A woman glides along the river’s spine, basin brimming with bricks of palm oil soap. Odour of soursop & potash floats from the steel drum. Reach for another brick. & another. & another.
hands sing over stone
sleeves of foam linger in the
river’s greening mouth
A mob of pagne tinsels the river, the buttons like crushed ice. Fingers chafe, rough as jute. Gather wet clothes, wring & dry them. On grass. Or guard rails. Or the steel lattice, where odours of exhaust & trash overwhelm. Afternoon peters into evening. Tempers flare in air banal as cotton. You heat the iron over coals, press clothes & fold. Walk home in the brewing dark. Eat, sleep, wake. Repeat yesterday today. & tomorrow. & the day after.
shadows rise & fall:
pale replicas you shed like
this dawn-to-dark husk
O, meticulous men & women, who rise in dawn’s hushed creases, still dreaming in their mother tongue, who weep soap until they breathe the gleaming edge of evening. O Fanicos, who never sleep, who keep dreams afloat for their sons & daughters.
the musk of marsh &
swill dissolves into your veins:
labour’s sweet stench
To read ‘Vessel’, and for more from Issue 33, order your copy today!
Poets, for your chance to appear in Pulp Literature and on the blog, enter the 2022 Magpie Award for Poetry, open now until April 15th!
First Prize is $500 and publication in Issue 36, Autumn 2022. And two runners up will each be awarded $50 and publication.
For all the details, and to enter, visit the contest page!
Ottawa-born and Costa Rica–based, Cara Waterfall has poetry in Best Canadian Poetry, The Fiddlehead, The Night Heron Barks, and more. She won Room’s 2018 Short Forms contest, Room‘s 2020 Poetry Contest, and the Editors’ Choice Award for Pulp Literature’s 2020 Magpie Award for Poetry. In 2019, she was a finalist for Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize and a shortlisted candidate for the CBC Poetry Prize. She has a diploma in Poetry and Lyric Discourse from The Writer’s Studio at SFU. Visit her at carawaterfall.com.
Cover image credit: ‘Fanicos on Banks of Banco Fores’, copyright Cara Waterfall
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