Washcloths: The Shape of Care
This poem explores illness, care, and motherhood through a domestic ritual: folding washcloths.
During treatment, familiar systems of order and rituals of the home were disrupted. Well-intended care by others altered small, intimate practices that once felt secure and concrete. The washcloths become a record of agency, touch, and protection, especially in the early days motherhood, where her hands would mediate the world before it reached a child.
Rather than dramatizing illness, the poem sets its focus on what quietly changes and what does not fully return. It reflects on healing as an uneven process.
The poem resists resolution, honoring both care received and the subtle disorientation that can remain.
We don’t fold the washcloths the same anymore.
Our guests don’t know
they used to be trifold after a half fold.
They don’t know
one hundred fit snugly in her top left drawer.
No one knows
the relief I felt
when my hands met their softness,
before they touched her newborn skin.
I didn’t know
they were folding them wrong
when I was diagnosed.
The nurses didn’t know
I couldn’t fold them anymore.
They put them in new places,
in their easy and flimsy square shape.
They cared for me
when I couldn’t.
But the washcloths were wrong.
There are one hundred washcloths
stacked
in a place and way I didn’t choose.
Now I’m folding one the square way.
I am healing.
You are two.
And we don’t fold the washcloths the same anymore.