Don’t Let Go
by Naomi Klouda
Shroud Glacier arises while I bathe the dog.
Sadie leaps from the tub, suds on her paws,
and George comes home to find me two‑timing him with maps again.
Kirk and Scotty once stood on Knik Glacier’s impossible blue—
panels tilting like a deck in storm.
I flew over once and felt the same:
the world breaking into facets no one could stand on for long.
Brooklyn writes: twenty-two dead in the snowstorm.
Florida writes: iguanas falling from trees.
People cradle them inside like stunned green infants.
On PBS, Thwaites Glacier swallows a 3,000-foot probe whole.
I can’t stop thinking of the iguanas—
Who will pluck us from branches when the big melt comes?
Who will warm the survivors?
At 2 a.m. I look north for aurora—
solar storms flinging light like warning flares.
Sadie pads over, sits beside me.
Counting glaciers used to soothe me.
Now I list the chain of cause and effect: ice to ocean,
ocean to jet stream, jet stream to Florida freeze,
freeze to falling reptiles, reptiles to human hands.
Who rescues the humans?
Bangladesh already drowning in the rearranged map.
Coffee climbs the Andes.
Seasons forget their names.
I breathe in the scent of the cup
to steady the world.
Dinner again from take‑out boxes.
George pours Sonoma wine—
his sister’s valley flooding, then burning,
then flooding again.
“The vines are tough,” he says, “but the timing isn’t.”
I want to take notes, but he’s had enough
of my catastrophes. I sip, letting the grapes
speak their own weather.
Wilma arrives in her camel coat,
hair in a purposeful messy bun, eyes bright with certainty.
“President Trump should take Greenland,”
she says, as if it were a handbag.
I hide in the bathroom, thinking of Chamberlin Glacier,
soldiers training on ice as if toughness could stop melt.
I can’t bear the thought of Trump’s hands on sacred glaciers.
Back in the kitchen, I pour her orange juice—
the price rising with every frost.
She giggles: “Climate change is a hoax.”
Her heart races.
Mine sinks.
The house quiets.
Sadie breathes on the rug.
I scroll satellite images for something not collapsing.
Matanuska appears— my first glacier, my first dance with ice.
She’s holding, for now,
flowing at her ancient pace.
But Shroud returns— small, tattered, already half‑gone.
What if “stable” only means “not yet”? I whisper Sadie to bed
and try to count glaciers backward, Z to A, but I keep landing on S—
the ones already slipping out of the dictionary.
George suggests a priest.
“We’re not Catholic,” I say, but I go anyway.
Father Coughlin sits cross‑legged,
black robes pooling like ink.
“Confession is good for the soul,” he offers, gently.
I tell him I can’t fix any of it— the displaced humans,
the stunned iguanas, the coffee, the grapes, the glaciers.
But I keep watching. Maybe that’s my rebellion:
refusing to let the world go quietly.
If the ice won’t let go of me,
I won’t let go of it either.
He nods, eyes misting.
“Perhaps God wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Driving home through snow—
Muir’s tender snowflower—
I swipe tears with the wipers. It almost works,
If you squint and blink fast enough
to see the world still holding on.