Bart Wilcox
Wash & Fold, Berkeley, California
Oil on canvas, 16″ x 20″

I don’t know. I suppose if I lived here
I’d find the charm of its homeliness
wearing off like most of the sign paint
on the older stretches of Shattuck Avenue.
I know why Ivan can’t leave. Because he’s
a relic, like me, but I’m a visiting relic,
the traveling fingerbone of a saint.
And at the Wash & Fold, none of the
big washers work, the ones you really
want to load and watch like I don’t know
children playing on a jungle gym
in Emeryville. And they’ll never work
is my bet. Those are goners even though
they take up half the laundromat.
The polish on the concrete is worn
thread-thin as my hundred-year-old
Grateful Dead t-shirt and I think of
records played into rings, mostly due
to Ivan, who is an audiophile, and
recently crushed vertebrae moving
boxes of vinyl he will never ever
play. Recidivist Records should be the
name of the shop he could open
next to the Wash & Fold and unload,
unload, wash and unload endlessly
vinyl, through all time, Berkeley time,
and he should get some of these
whatever they are flora unique to Berkeley
that look like a group of tourists from
Andromeda, rising in the cracks
in the middle of the sidewalk.