Art: Elina Ghanbari
THE CLEANING LADY
like a phantom Mr. Clean she came over once every two weeks, polished the old creaking parquet, swept the dust off the foreign fiction, scrubbed the sink, changed the sheets, placed chocolates on my pillow and along with an envelope of three twenties, left. a lovely Polish woman with a crucifix, how sorry she was when she broke a vase and offered to pay for it, months later she quit because she was going to college to pursue a degree in Biology. one night in bed, massaging honey & shea butter over my thighs i mentioned to my lover that i was searching for a cleaning lady. we had been together for what seemed like three million years, without once having a serious conversation, we lived on love and stale chicken tabak. a gorgeous man with an incredible body and an insatiable appetite, he inquired how much i was paying and when i told him sixty dollars, he immediately offered to be my cleaning lady. paralyzed by pity and horror, i stared back at my beautiful lover, pressed my lips together and said nothing.
Marina Rubin’s work had appeared in over eighty magazines and anthologies including 13th Warrior Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Dos Passos Review, 5AM, Nano Fiction, Coal City, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Jewish Currents, Lillith, Pearl, Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, The Worcester Review and many more. She is an editor of Mudfish, the Tribeca literary and art magazine. She is a 2013 recipient of the COJECO Blueprint Fellowship.