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.

Nice, Côte d'Azur

Maybe the sun will stay here a while. The quad blooms with it, with grass and daisies and frisbees.

This Summer I will visit Lyon. Perhaps Lyon will be like Nice. Nice is the first city I visited unsupervised. It is so beautiful there, with its narrow alley-streets and palm trees. I was homesick there, because it reminded me so much of San Diego. I had not realized how much I missed cacti until our train roared past the shore and I saw them, standing lone and proud, among poorer grasses.

Nice really is not much like California, besides the climate. The people are different, and the sand is different. The beaches are made of rocks that hurt when you stretch over them. But the air is sweet and fine and salty, and the rocks slowly arrange themselves to the curve of your body the longer you lay there. Soon you are as one of them- a big, fleshy stone who has created its own hollow.


We rented an AirBnb- my first- up a goodly hill not far from the center of town. It was maybe ten minutes' walk from Place Garibaldi. It was funny to me that an Italian national would have his own square in a French city. But it was not that funny and maybe I was trying to show off my learning.

We walked twenty miles a day, to the beach, to Matisse Museum, to the market to buy fresh figs and tomatoes to eat with basil grown en plein air. C'est magnifique, mademoiselle! Regardez!

Nice is the closest I have been to Italy, and Hannah dreamed of Florence as we drank fine Italian red wine with dinner. Perhaps I will go to Florence this Summer too. I have wanted to go after reading The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, and hearing him speak about it.

San Diego nights are violet, Strasbourg nights are blue, and Prague nights are the blackest of black. But in Nice, the nights are golden. Warm, molten, sensuous. The waiters were better educated than doctors. One Signor Luca spoke French, English, Spanish, and Italian. He spoke the last with our new friend, whom we met while stuck in the castle, as he brought us our aperitifs, our arrabiata, and our limoncellos. Their voices danced, lilting like an Irish brogue, but smooth like a Colombian song.

I bought some soca to eat on the train back to Strasbourg.

We missed that train, so I ate it for lunch instead, inhaling the cracked pepper smell and wiping the oil off my fingers with a napkin. (soca is a chickpea pancake sold in Nice).

Anyways, we took the night train back.

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.