Harryette Mullen’s “Implications”

The LARB Quarterly no. 45, “Submission,” presents a new poem by Harryette Mullen.

By Harryette MullenJuly 12, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

Implications

You loved the lovely order of finished laundry folded in neat stacks. Plying a worthy craft, you fashioned a wardrobe of smart garments, tucked and pleated. Hands, clever with needles, deft at gathering and smoothing fabric, steered the iron, a gallant ship steaming over ruckled waves.

Washed onto your castaway island, you’d mend a bent bird’s injured wing, correct a child’s crooked collar. Not to worry, sure to pay the bills on time, filing receipts in accordion folder pockets, you straightened creased pages of borrowed books, replacing old dog ears with tasseled bookmarks.

Your hands folded flat sheets into three-dimensional figures. Cranes in flight, prehistoric lizards, paper tugboats, and sunray fans of versatile mulberry bark. On the unrolled yoga mat, your body bent in half, doubling forward, then nearly kneeling to stretch the legs of a flexible dog.

Increasingly, stiff spine buckling, the book forgets where it left off. No new wrinkle or dog-eared page holds your place in the final chapter. Only lately, thoughts meander, words get lost in implications, caught in misfolded proteins in the creases of a furrowed brain.

¤

Featured image: Édouard Manet. Sea View, Calm Weather, 1864. The Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection (1922.425). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed July 3, 2025. Image has been cropped.