"Spring in Ohio" by Graham Todd
This afternoon walking the few blocks to the laundromat, the town groggy now in taking each of the 50 degrees, the birdsongs, my duffel of laundry slung heavily on my hip. On Clough Street, near the freight tracks, a man looked out of his paled minivan at me, wondered, I imagine, at where it is I was heading. DOGS GO TO HEAVEN, authoritative on his shirtfront.
The light here is always halfway, it lands but doesn’t erupt. Even at the laundromat with its two walls of windows open to the South, its whiteness and order willing a glow, I felt that itch for Oakland. A spring gale come off the bay, over the industrial port islands and through Jack London Square warehouses, their smell of misted produce and coffee, onto the flat of the city at midday; the homeless lady who I watched pelt gulls with frosted donuts, lifting them gently from a pink box to tear at the hole and shriek in her personal war.
Yesterday when I spoke to Mary, her face on my little screen, the camera eye angled so that I couldn’t see her dress for the annual spring opening of the White Elephant Flea Market, we still said love. A limb appeared now and again onscreen, but mostly I watched her window in Oakland where a sheet of partially conjoined altocumulus ran. I remembered us, together in our life jackets, unzipped, sailing on Lake Merritt, working upwind to the little bridge, the anchored boat the birds never claim for reasons unknown.
The warmer air streamed through downtown is so broken up by the buildings it doesn’t have time to set down on the little finger of water. Puffs and lulls become impossible to read there, arrive unannounced, weakened. Mostly we floated while tourists, their happy sounds, milled around us in paddleboats near the entrance to Fairyland. The original children’s park of America with its big shoe lit and sunny on my favorite part of the lake. Pre-Land Disney visited for ideas, examined the books for profit margins, believed he could overcome the antimony of economics and love.
Sat there on our beaten, rental fiberglass, Mary and I splashed each other with dirty water, tacked over for a better view of the colorful sign. We always had just enough time in our $20 hour to reach it and return back, just enough time to de-rig, tie the halyard to the boom and hoist it off the deck.
All I can think is that everywhere March must be different. The fat man, bearded, in thong sandals, tells me dryer #1 is broken, holds up to me his limp sweatpants. It didn’t dry a thing, he says, cradling them two-handed in the space between us. All of it is still so wet.
Graham Todd grew up and lives in Pennsylvania. He studied literature and religion at Stanford and received his MFA from Bowling Green. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Southampton Review, Passages North, Pembroke Magazine, Notre Dame Review, and more. He's had residencies at MASS MoCA, the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. For work, he does all kinds of crap as the Deputy Director of Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival. He's currently at work on a novel. grahamtoddwrites.com
