Celia Bland on “Under the Porch”

My grandmother and I always went to Coin Laundry near 3 Guys Grocery where they passed the savings on to us. There were wire buggies for wheeling wet to dryers. There was a sign: Don’t Dye On Us. A bakery next door made antebellum birthday cakes. A white plastic woman was slotted into a white cake, her breasts and shoulders iced and the cake below this sweet bodice became a hoop skirt, ruffled and beribboned in different colors of spun sugar. You could blow out the candles. You could slice your way to her naked legs and tiny high heeled feet.

This one time, I was fourteen. I’d slotted quarters into the dryer and I looked around for the dog. Why did I never have a leash for her? Not even a length of rope. She must have slipped through the glass door when someone came in with their baskets while I was flopping wet clothes into the porthole. I searched up past Hardee’s and down near the gas pumps and found her under another dog – stuck, impaled—in the front yard of a brick house. Is that house torn down now? Did each individual brick explode in humiliation? The man of the house stood on his porch and laughed as I tried pulling my dog from his dog’s swollen member.

But there was nothing to do but wait.

Nine weeks later she slipped under our porch to give birth in the dark on dank clay. I’d laid a faded towel over cardboard under a table in the living room, but bitches hide when whelping or dying. I thought of that dog years later when I lay naked on a thin rectangle of paper under spotlights magnified by the OR’s glossy tiles. Masked professionals in dull white gowns moved with purpose and instruments, or stood at the ready, waiting. I think my poem “Under the Porch” gives some sense of the distance between my desire to retain a modicum of dignity and theirs to see some action between my stirruped legs. What seems to be the problem? I should have screamed and bit them, crawled under the table on my hands and knees, and bucked that baby out of me.

But of course, I did not.