The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Amy Miller's "White Noise Lullaby"

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The Poet Laureate
in the Laundromat

for Lawson Fusao Inada

He stands to watch the comforter
hug and unhug itself
as the dryer muscles on and hums
its white noise lullaby.
Even in the warm, overbright room,
he wears a leather jacket, hands
pushed deep in the pockets. Music,
perhaps, is what he hears
in the tinning and rumble,
notes dopplered to a shriek. Or poems,
spinning and powered
by their own unseen magnets.
He is not writing this down.
It washes over, river
and color and metal. But sometimes
something catches—
there, you can see—
he tilts his head, surprised.

This selection comes from Amy Miller’s chapbook White Noise Lullaby available now from Cyclone Press. Purchase your copy here!

Amy Miller‘s poetry has appeared in Bellingham Review, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, Northwest Review, Permafrost, Rattle, and ZYZZYVA, and the online chapbookRough House (whiteknucklepress.com). She won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, as well as the Whiskey IslandPoetry Prize and the Cloudbank Prize, and has been a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and the 49th Parallel Award. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal, works as the publications project manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.

Noh Anothai was a researcher with the Thailand-United States Education Foundation (Fulbright Thailand) from 2011-12. In that time he translated programs and hosted cultural events for Thailand’s College of Dramatic Arts under the Ministry of Culture. Winner of Lunch Ticket’s inaugural Gabo Prize for Translation and Multilingual Texts in 2014, Anothai’s original poems and translations of Thai poetry have appeared in Ecotone, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. He has contributed to Words Without Borders and Tin House, and serves as a reader for the international River Styx poetry contest. He teaches for the online MFA program in Creative Writing at Lindenwood University.