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“I’m an archivist,” I proclaim to my partner, as I stop (for the fourth time) to take a picture of a piece of paper in a closed tattoo shop that reads “Sorry, no piercing,” and, later, a piece of graffiti that says “FUCK FUCK FUCK.” As Michel de Certeau affirms, “There is a rhetoric of walking.” The patterns of our movements make a shape we can’t see.
‘Her archive reveals varied and eclectic interests,’ the imagined narrator in my head says to no one as I screenshot the same meme for the third time. Maybe this is the egomaniac in me, or perhaps it speaks to an embarrassing desire that someone will, one day, study my practices with as much care and intimacy as I study the cities I move through.
One of my most cherished books, Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss, offers a kind of field guide to the resonance and rhyming of the universe–how to read the city like a Tarot deck. I love this. City as oracle. Moving through it offers symbols—revelatory, and sometimes highly personal.
In Lisbon, where I live currently, these moments are startling. I feel often that I am in dialogue with the corners and stairs and streets. I encounter expressions of desire laid bare. A city is for marking up– for writing anonymous love notes to everyone. And walking is a way of saying, “I want, I want.” With every step, a flirtation unfolds.
A city can also express its displeasure—it can quietly revolt and resist. “E a pobreza?” written on the poster in front of a new luxury apartment development. And “Eat the rich” scrawled next to an ATM in an affluent neighborhood.
Obvious enough to be noticed, and nondescript enough to burrow into the subconscious of a passerby.
Sara Ahmed observes, “It is interesting to note that in landscape architecture they use the term ‘desire lines’ to describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow.” Our wants etch wear into the topography of a city, and our bodies can be an intervention.
Walking, observing, and stopping are ways that I write. I imagine I’m being pulled by something affixed to my navel, as if I was a tram screeching along a track, sparks flying from where the pulley meets the electric grid. This engagement brings poems to me. They wash up at my feet, arriving in complete images. My only work then is to render them a home —to build language around so that they may be cracked open and felt or consumed by others.
Following de Certeau, I’m also very into an idea of a rhetoric of subways, ferries, buses, trams, and the connective tissue between them. My lens on public space is influenced by the facts that I have never owned a car and I’m able-bodied. I’ve joked with friends that I’m a walking Rome2Rio. Give me point A and Point B and, by god, I will get there. I don’t mind walking on overpasses at night, or taking three buses.
No matter the mode, I will probably be writing. Writing often feels, at first, like language entering my body. It’s almost as if the sense-based experiences are translated into language as I move. The beginnings of a poem stumbled upon like an easter egg. I move through a certain atmosphere and I am soaked in it. Splashed by the poem like an inconsiderate driver going too fast through a puddle.
I write differently in different cities. I also write differently in different forms of transit.
I’ll start with ferries. A ferry ride is usually not very long. The Star Ferry in Hong Kong takes 8-10 minutes. The Staten Island Ferry takes 25 minutes. Depending on the destination, the ferry in Lisbon can take as little as 10 minutes— from Cais do Sodré Ferry Terminal to Cacilhas, for example—and up to 25 minutes if you’re going from Terreiro do Paço to Barreiro (as I did one afternoon to get a ribbon of typewriter ink). Much like this errand, a ferry is also anachronistic. A stubborn holdover. Many aren´t modernized. Giant whales chained to a route, sliding back and forth countless times per day. Even though the trip is short, ferries often generate a wistful, melancholic feeling in me. Looking out a window at an aquatic expanse I feel a little bereft. The journey offers itself to contemplation. Being on water gives me the feeling that I am going somewhere important. Leaving it all behind. At night, it gives me chills. To leave or return to an inflorescence of lights, bundled cosmically, and climbing towards the sky. The writing is brief, breathless, and forlorn. Every line is an expression of longing— an embodied knowing that, in order to arrive somewhere, first you have to leave.
Ah, todo o cais é uma saudade de pedra!” (PESSOA, 2014:73)
Ah, every wharf is a nostalgia made of stone! (trans. Zenith)
On subways, or metros, there is something about being below ground that mutes my senses. Writing doesn’t happen to me there. The type of writing I do on a subway is deeply connected to efficiency. This is where I make my lists. In many cities there are initiatives to put poems on subways. Maybe this is controversial, but I don’t think poems belong on subways. I don’t want to read a poem when I’m hanging onto a pole, the top of my head jammed in someone’s armpit. I want to look at insane advertisements. I want to stare at the map.
Riding buses, especially for longer than an hour, feels like a manic collision between public and private. I feel anonymous on a bus, and phrases and stems of language arrive suddenly and in wisps. I just as quickly forget them—after repeating them to myself, they’re gone. Whether a piece of dialogue from a character’s mouth, a seed of a poem, they arrive. And leave. This brings up questions of authorship; what is really mine to render?
I rarely sleep on longer rides because buses require a kind of attentiveness. It’s also the form of transportation in which I’ve had the most conversations with strangers. There is nothing like arriving by bus in New York City. Seeing it from the outside. That breathless moment has spawned so many love poems in me.
“I tell myself that traveling is very similar to being in love.”
—Etel Adnan, Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)
Like Adnan and her experience of gazing into the expansive horizon, experiencing pure pleasure, I am often filled with that sense of erotic possibility when I am traveling over land.
I’m so happy on a train I can rarely write. I love trains. Anything long and overland gives the body a sense of how far it’s actually going. Unlike planes which, my mom always says, leave our souls behind and then they take a day or two to catch up.
I like traveling at the same pace as my soul—maybe my body is a little bit ahead or a little behind depending on the moment. My soul trailing me like a shadow, or forging a bit ahead like the beam of a flashlight. I remember taking a 12 hour train from Budapest to Bucharest. The vacant landscape slid by, mostly a vast, dark ocean. My ex and I turned on the reading light and sat in the bottom bunk together, reading excerpts out loud from Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water. To pass the time. On trains, the ‘not writing’ is an inhale, a holding of breath for an eventual exhale— the words that gather around me will clamor for my attention when I’ve arrived in the new place— sitting on the edge of a bed or sinking into a hot bath.
I am maybe in the minority when I say this, but I fucking love airports. Until recently, I was someone who arrived three hours early for a domestic flight. I love arriving early, drinking overpriced Ph-balanced water and Swedish fish, and shamelessly watching people. An airport is a place where you are allowed to loiter.
I have metabolized some intense shit on planes. There is also something about being in the actual sky that makes me shed everything I thought I knew about myself. I feel brand new. On a recent plane ride, I became hopelessly obsessed with the idea of traveling to Antarctica. Convinced that I will find a way to get there sometime within the next decade. Researching cruises. I started sketching out an erotic love story set in a station in Antarctica. Forget the writer I thought I was, when I’m up in that little sky tube I am ready to change my life. I want to ghost write someone’s autobiography. I consider experiments in epic poetry. I compose a song. I write the text I will likely never send.
The poems in my first book were written on all forms of transportation, in notebooks and on scraps of paper, and often in my phone notes. I love writing poetry in phone notes when I’m in public, because there is nothing about it that signals “writer” — I could be sending a very long, impassioned text. I could be emailing my boss. I could be shopping, posting, scrolling.
If I whip out a notebook and start writing with a pen, suddenly I’m opening myself up to people’s gazes and projections.
I don’t need that kind of psychic pollution if I’m in a process! I prefer to remain largely unperceived, nondescript, low key.
Public transportation offers me a chance to dissolve my identity and commune oracularly with the place that poetry comes from. It’s a quiet form of worship and surrender. There is belief involved, and relationship. Everyone engaged in a dance, in a form of solidarity. I often think about the phenomenon of road rage and how it is a symptom of privilege and isolation. Sure, a subway car is not a utopia, but I’ve seen a lot more beautiful things transpire there than I ever have on a highway, single commuters locked into their cars, bemoaning the rush hour traffic.
On the subway, I see people give up their seats. I see people wedge their bodies in between the closing doors to give someone a chance to make the train. There is a sense of, we are all going somewhere different, but we are going there together.
Moving through a city is an expression of trust. That the bus won’t break down. That the ferry won’t fail. That people will stay in their lanes. And if they don’t, that they’ll at least say sorry. My writing is also an expression of trust—a way to reach out with tendrils and touch the spaces that hold and move me. It allows me to be private in public, and, paradoxically, to connect with the world at large through burrowing more deeply into that which is unmistakably mine.