Becoming Noah
by Karen Loeb
From the Sacramento River Valley
I had to evacuate my house earlier today.
I’m calling from the Florin Park Hotel.
Trucks came by River Road before sun-up.
Big loud speakers. Jesus. It could have woken the dead.
I had to think for a minute where I was.
I thought it might be part of a dream.
The snow melt from the mountains is too much,
flooding the Sacramento, and they say it will be
over the river’s levee, submerging the nearby farmland.
Recently, I'd been picking persimmons and oranges
from my trees. Bags of them. Deserted on the porch.
I wasn’t able to catch Whiskers. That cat is fast.
He’s on his own—he’s a good tree climber.
Cats can fend for themselves, though he wasn’t
a good mouser. He might have to learn new ways.
Let me tell you, I never want to abandon ship again.
I’d rather float away in my house than stay in this hotel.
Everything at the Florin smells of air freshener
and old socks. Imagine your stomach on the spin cycle
of the washing machine. Like mine now.
There’s a vending machine in the lobby with packages
of saltines, and cookies as big as saucers.
The clerk gave me a number to call for pizza
and assured me there’s coffee and donuts in the morning.
I don’t care what you say—that I’m too isolated,
I need to be around people. I see enough people
at the grocery store or Home Depot.
If those represent what people are these days,
then no thank you. Men walking around in undershirts.
Women in less than that.
Once a week I go to the Lotus Blossom for a meal.
They have five different kinds of mushrooms in this one soup.
None of them is anything they have at the Bel Air grocery.
This is not your Campbell’s cream of mushroom.
It’s the finest creation in the Valley.
As your father, you can trust me on this.
Karen Loeb’s poems and stories have appeared lately and over time in Puerto del Sol, Big City Lit, Sangam Literary Magazine, Willow Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, North American Review, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere. Her work has won the fiction and poetry contests in Wisconsin People and Ideas, and she was Eau Claire, Wisconsin writer-in-residence in the recent past. After three residencies as a fellow at the Virginia Center, her story collection, Jump Rope Queen, won a Minnesota Voices Project Award and was published by New Rivers Press. She participates in the annual Cascadia poetry postcard festival, while continuing to write, give readings, and engage in a vibrant literary life in Wisconsin.