Laundromat Essay

by Kyle Buckley

ISBN-10: 1-55245-206-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-55245-206-6

5 x 8 in, 80pp, Paperback

$16.95 CAD

October 2008

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A difference between us bridged my fondness for a street that ran through the kitchen. It was evenly lined with the trees that line those kinds of streets. That autumn we had to gather the leaves from the floor. They fell when you quietly pulled down the shelves from inside the cabinets.

‘I know the owner of the laundromat,’ reflects the narrator of this extended poem, ‘but can’t remember his name (which could be for many reasons).’ The laundromat is across the street from the narrator’s apartment. He is looking at it through the window but can’t seem to get there, as the architecture of his apartment – and of the city – seems to keep changing. So, too, do the narrator’s memories. Figures from his past and present appear disguised as animal characters, misremembered, who participate in the construction of the convoluted narrative.

The poem is then swept up in narrative tangents and detours as the narrator, also nameless, tries to navigate the consequential absurdities of living in a city that is fracturing around him; he needs to get out of the city – or maybe he already has – and back, through airports and restaurants and a whole city’s worth of staircases, all in one night.

When our narrator finally makes it out of his stairwell and across the street, the owner is closing the laundromat. He won’t let the narrator in, but he does want to discuss the whereabouts of his son, Hoopy, with the narrator. It’s possible that the narrator, his brother and Hoopy have recently gone on a fishing trip.

The Laundromat Essay is a spiralling poem about the pathology of forgetting, a poetic narrative of credible absurdity and dazzling interest.

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