Laundry Day (by the Sea), and: Little Call of the Squirrel

Abstract

Laundry Day (by the Sea), and: Little Call of the Squirrel Erik Jonah (bio) Laundry Day (by the Sea) Far off, in pale blue shallows,the whales give bright, occasionalwisps of spray, or a gray turn milky on their backs. Today’svacation from vacation; hourslike a loose shirt on the line yawning at the sun across the valley,the freshwater mouth of the Klamath rivera wash of blue that vanishes in blue. And what’s that taste?Since salmon swim the Klamath twice—its water the same river?— not sweet but maybe—clean—orcold and bodiless, various as the layersof saline mixing in the surf, black granite like eroded castlesand fog in a thin strata, driftingtoward the redwoods, nearly unnoticed. Only, past noon, I rememberto write: Our morning fog dissolved.As if our ghosts were gone on holiday, the whole trip a Zoloft dream, dizzywith indifferent happenings, faces,family, children laughing elsewhere, bright bits of chatter lostbeyond the low recuperative humexhausting from the dryer. [End Page 62] This life—mine?—churnswithout a narrative, white sockof sodden melodrama or the remains of a loose tissuefished from a pocket. As if I could holdthe year’s odd lumps of grief, its driftwood battered down to bone.A poem on vacation, watching whales—their plumes of breath, not messages, just air. [End Page 63] Little Call of the Squirrel Quivered in grass, some subtle sign flashesand squirrels course through my yard,suburban blood in circulation or a songsung sotto voce. Generations of a brood in slydisguise, or maybe the same gray squirrelwho glides below the wires, who’s stealingseed for birds. Surely the oak is enough. Not so,some squirrel cants in my mind—absurd. Meanwhile the ur-squirrel oversoulengirdles the earth, a skein of limber bodiestuned to manifest design. Quickened in dust,burying each word in their vast small landscapes—now chattered down with falling bits of shell,all corners of my yard turned sentinel. [End Page 64] Erik Jonah erik jonah’s work appears or is forthcoming in Five Points, Cave Wall, and the Atlanta Review. A nonbinary writer, they were a 2016 MFA scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a finalist for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. Erik currently runs a school for runaway and homeless youth in Eugene, Oregon. * Copyright © 2021 University of North Carolina Wilmington