sans titre

Lately
When it rains
It really rains
I mean
It pours
Truth
Lies
Drink
Tears
N'importé quoi.

Falling apart
Maybe
Is
Knitting
Newly together
Or maybe
Not.

You're crazy.
Crazy bored
Crazy lonely
Crazy lovesick.

France.
It's a dream
A hoot in hell.
Ah
But how beautiful
Is hell.

Devils?
Elsewhere.
Broken
Or not
Who knows.

It doesn't rain
Not in
San
Diego
But
In Santa Cruz

Also
No.
Only without.

Leave
Really really really
Leave.
Can't.
Come home.
No such thing.

Lately
When it rains
It's inside
Your
Two
Waters.

Salary

The salt stung,
bleached what was black,
dried what glowed,
healed what wept,
and purged what festered.

Rocks,
shells,
jagged bits of glass,
bit
at toes and ankles
like flesh hungry piranhas
as the tide roared in.

The salt danced
a wild madrigal,
shook out seaweed locks,
like a banshee.

And it becomes like blood.
And like blood,
how freely it flows.

Shut eyes
forgot the perch of the sun.
Salt replaced it.
Salt was the only truth,
the sole surviving reality.

From salt we came,
and to salt we return-

not the sun.

Home Again

February is fast approaching, and I haven't posted anything for nearly two months. I not only didn't post, I didn't write. Not once. I think not doing something is as habit-forming as doing it. Entertaining the idea is always much more strenuous than the act, and I think it must be like that for everyone. I was also afraid that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted to, but that's never the point anyway. Words will come like rivers, jumbled and bold and unrepentant. I am finding that they aren't the ones I look for, but they'll serve all the better for it.



I often think of Strasbourg now that I'm newly settled into my dorm in Syracuse. The last 2 things I'd posted were about the terrorist attacks in Paris. The remainder of my term was shadowed by them. I did not go to Berlin the following weekend, and people were afraid. Stunned, but life went on. Strasbourg had its Christmas Market, and it was greatly reduced by cautionary measures.



I can't help but feel that somehow I didn't appreciate my last days as well as I should have. They say you fall in love with the first city that loves you back- not your family, but you. I miss Strasbourg so much that it must be true. I miss my friends, I miss hearing the guttural elegance of Alsatian French, I miss the serpentine curls of smoke from Claire's cigarettes and the way the smell lingered for hours by her chair.

Quais Rouget de Lisle

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I whisper the tramlines to the darkened room. F, Place d'Islande and Elsau. B, Hohenheim Gare. C, Gare Central. D, Poteries. And so on. I trace my path to my university building, lingering over the tram lines and stops, and the streets I walked on. We always met at Gallia. There was a bar near there, just along the river, that we went to every weekend in the beginning. Jimmy's, it was called. I never figured out who Jimmy was.

I'm not such a child that I don't see that I miss Strasbourg because it was the site of that terrible and beautiful uncertainty,when you are more adult than child for the first time. I'm not such a grown-up that I let this fact make me sensible. Frankly, I don't have a single sensible bone in my body.

Half Timber in San Diego

San Diego is the home I knew as a child, Strasbourg the one I knew as a changeling. There will be others, of course. But these nights, these are the two that make me lay awake and think and think and think.

In my little gray-blue room in San Diego I have a box stuffed full with train tickets and the set list from the Hozier concert in Amsterdam and maps. Brown paper from the markets of Nice all the way to Fez, holding figs and oranges with fleeting ideas scribbled on them.Even a coaster I stole in a drunken stupor from Oktoberfest. When I come home in March I will put them in order. You will hear then how Rue des Cordonniers looked those fine December evenings. But some things I have in this orange sketchpad, like the angry poem I wrote after being mugged in Morocco.

There are many things I never wrote down. The Lennon Wall, the towering irony of it all, and the first Cat Cafe I ever went to was in Prague. The Tower of London, paling to the wild Irish beauty of Glendalough. Some things I will never remember, and some have become part of me, mingling with blood and bone, like San Diego during a rare storm.



I think I will go back to France next year.

Del Mar

Black hair, Black eyes
looking at the road through as sea of dark
one hand, a finger, none at all.
She decides if we die
hurtling down this road,
this life.

The sea beckons 
with foaming robes of
blue, gray, black, black, black
we are closed in,
in black

We three girls, not so young 
yet children still

Los Arboles, the turn
Clarion, the inn
Vida, Brio, Bustle

The air is salt,
the ocean sweat,
and our car black.


Maybe I shouldn't explain anything, because that would box in the meaning of my poem. But I will, because I feel silly leaving it like this, as though I could ever hope to be an enigma.

Tomorrow I will wake up at 4 am to catch a 6:15 flight to Syracuse, New York, where unlike San Diego, is expecting actual weather. 

Lord, I haven't seen snow in so long. Apparently asides from the interviews (that's why I'm flying to New York), the dress code is casual. Dress like you would at school, they tell me. That would be appropriate. Except that I wear flip flops and shorts to school like my life depends on it.

Anyways, that's all besides the point. I just meant that it's cold up there, which is why I went to Del Mar. For those of you non- espanolers, that's a beach here in San Diego. It hit and passed ninety this weekend, and I wanted to spend as much time as possible in the sun before I stuffed myself into a thick coat and Doc Martens and a liberal dusting of a meth-like white powder. Back East, they call that "snow".

It's warming up here, which is nice because I was getting tired of cold weather. Well, not cold. Coldish, I mean.

So the poem is about Del Mar (hence the name). The first stanza is about my friend Brittany, who was driving. I'm not trying to rat a girl out, but she scares me when she drives. She's so confident that I never think she'll get into an accident, but really, who the hell drives with one hand while spooning the contents of her Sambazon bowl into her mouth with the other? 

"Yo, Nina, put the car in drive for me."

Lord. 

Then, obviously, the next stanza is about the sea as it meets the shore. When you drive along the main road, you can see the ocean on one side. It's so pretty, how it sparkles and wrinkles and folds. 

"The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls..."

The "black" thing is referring to Brittany's car, which is black. Sleek, shiny, man-made. The roar of its engine is lost in the roar of the sea, which is sometimes also black. Different, though.

The stanza with a seemingly random assortment of words is a collection of landmarks in Del Mar. A sign at the turn reads "Los Arboles", but I'm not sure what it means because I never read farther than that. I mean, it's Spanish for "the Trees", but I don't know if they're condos or apartments or a real estate company or whatever. Then, as you drive on, you'll certainly pass the Clarion Inn.

Clarion, like trumpets. Like bells, like the clash of spears. Sorry, "Clarion" just sounds so Camelot-y.

Vida, Brio, and Bustle refer to other small businesses. A nail salon, a boutique, whatever. 

I don't know why I've been writing so much poetry lately, or why I've suddenly gotten so comfortable putting it out on the internet. It's not very good, but I'm getting there.

Hope you're all well.