While she was babysitting me, she used to put load after load in the washing machine, sweep before lunch and after lunch, wash the dishes, dry the laundry, vacuum, get on her knees to sponge the bathroom floors, iron our clothes while watching soap operas all afternoon. I remember how she smelled of dishwater and the almond hand moisturizer by the sink and how, when I said, “But you just sweeped!” because I wanted her to play with me, not sweep the kitchen again, she pinched my cheeks with her slippery fingers. I don’t believe in Heaven, don’t believe she’s up ship-shaping it, polishing the gates, tsk-tsking those who come through them with mud on their boots, sweeping angel feathers into a dustpan, pinching the fat cheeks of the cherubim. No: I don’t think she believed in God any more than I do. I think she liked going to church because everything there was so clean: the floors, the pews, the windows, the light. I see her rocketing into space, though. Grandma the astronaut, leaving the galaxy on her ironing board, the dishtowel tucked in her apron waving behind her. There she is, a little woman polishing the stars, mopping up the spill of the Milky Way, washing the yolk of the Big Bang from the walls of the long hallway of eternity…

AmberBAmber Burke is graduate of Yale and the Writing Seminars MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. These days, she teaches writing and leads the 200-hour yoga teacher training at the University of New Mexico in Taos. She has written over 100 articles for Yoga International, and her creative work can be found in swamp pink, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Flyway, Mslexia, Superstition Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Quarterly West, and on her website: https://amberburke3.wixsite.com/amberburkewriting.