Poems Under the Dryer turns laundry day into a poem and a portrait. On Saturday, Aug 1, the start of Black August, I set up my manual typewriter inside Bubbleland, a neighborhood laundromat on Western, and write a free, original poem for anyone who wants one while their clothes spin. You tell me your name, your week, your kid's nickname, whatever's on your mind, and I write it on the spot. I also take your picture on Polaroid film, so you leave with both a poem and a portrait.

This is ekphrastic practice: art made in response to art and to people, in the lineage of Evie Shockley's The New Black. The poem-and-Polaroid pairing makes it literal. A face becomes a poem, and the poem sits beside the face.

A laundromat is one of the last rooms a whole neighborhood still shares. I'm Chicago's first Youth Poet Laureate and the originator of hood-womanism, and I put that work where people already are: free, no ticket, no bookstore. Before you go I scan your poem and Polaroid; the originals are yours, and the scans become a zine that stays at the laundromat so the block can read itself back.