welcome, traveler

The poet could not go on. I sat several rows back and watched him along with everyone else. His poem was called "Fuck art!" and he seemed disturbed by it, now that he was reading it in a large room full of many literate or interested or perhaps very very bored people, including at least one child as evinced by the very loud and high-pitched crying coming from the back of the room. He apologized for the printed profanity in the title but didn't stop himself as he read, as if he had forgotten all the naughty and crass language he had slipped into the stanzas to shock or perturb the reader, only now it was himself that was perturbed by it, stumbling over the words as the child cried. He only started to cry when the poem switched themes somewhere around the middle. It alluded to a past lover, someone he’d had to apologize to. I would bet that the relationship didn't last, given how suddenly he stopped-as if choking-and held his hands so as to cover his eyes. Everyone had to sit quietly and pretend not to be interested in his tears. He said, clearly, "I can't go on," directing this phrase to the editors to his left. He walked off without finishing and everyone clapped anyway, entertained by this coming alive of the poetic, by this raw expression of human emotion, somehow a testament to the magazine's worth and therefore to the worth of everyone in the room who had made the call to come to the reading. See, we all whispered to our seat partners, sounding erudite, This is where all the good Irish stuff is being published these days, all this real writing by real people. Real people being the ones who write poems about hating art in very conspicuous outfits and cry on stage, while all the fake writers and fake people sit in the audience and absorb the Dublin literati clout with every tear.

I bet everyone in that room went back home and pulled out the magazine to read the rest in print, to see what it was about that sentence he couldn't get through. I happened to be holding my copy at the event and following along as he read, so I knew the next sentence was something about a "cum stained mattress." It was gross to read and probably had something to do with infidelity, though whether it was his or hers I couldn't tell. I tried to imagine myself getting on stage and losing it like that, but I think no matter what it was I had written, I'd feel too exposed to be anything but prim, proper, and grateful for the opportunity.

I had met the editor of that particular magazine the day before, by chance, in a bookstore full of beautiful things. I had stopped by on my way to or from something, I can't remember, and had been hoping to pick up the 92nd issue of the Dublin Review. This is a quarterly magazine that publishes nice stories by Dublin's contemporary writers. I like reading it and quizzing myself on the place names, a proxy for my growing familiarity with the city. When I read the Fall issue it felt like settling in: heading down the same streets as so-and-so and grabbing the same pints in the same pubs as the writers who'd mentioned them.

Two women were blocking the little table in Books Upstairs where all the literature and poetry magazines are. I figured I'd wait for a while as they would move eventually. Anyway it was a bookstore and there's no better place to kill time, in fact the excuse to kill a little time before grabbing the one thing I told myself I had the allowance to buy was very welcome. I looked at some of the poetry collections while they spoke and then made my way over. One woman hadn't moved. She had long red hair like me but kept better than mine, blow dried and falling professionally over both shoulders. I stopped looking at her and started looking instead at the magazines, and as my fingers were hovering over one of the copies she said something to the other woman like, I hope you enjoy it! I pieced it together. This woman stands by the literary magazine table and watches people look at the literary magazines on the table because she has some sort of stake in them, possibly a writer or an editor or just a simple concerned reader, but more probably an editor, because she wouldn't tell the other girl that she hopes she enjoyed it as in the whole thing if it wasn't all somehow her work.

"Sorry, um, are you an editor of any of these?" Losing my public shame has been a very happy consequence of moving away again. And my hunch was right.

"Yes, I am, of HOWL," She said faux-bashfully, pointing to the one on the far left.

"I'm going to your launch tomorrow!" I did actually have a ticket to that, one of the many events happening for the Dublin Festival of Books. From there on we spoke for a while. Her name was Roisin, and she told me all about becoming editor of a swanky new publication and about how the contemporary writing scene is going. I told her about writing for ZYZZYVA in a past life and how I'd like to get back to submitting for magazines when I'm all done with the Masters. I even told her about my blog, silly thing, and pulled it up on my phone to show her. There was something so generous about her holding court with me while I spoke about all the Irish books I read, and the Irish writers I knew, and the philosophy I was doing, which loosely relates to questions of narrative and the self, and isn't that just so well-timed and interdisciplinary? It felt like one of those moments you hope to have when you move somewhere, a little scene in a play coming to life. I told her I'd see her at the reading which is where I was when the poet couldn't go on. I wondered after the fact how she felt about it, if she was embarrassed of him or for him or secretly very proud that everyone could see what real and serious emotions her new magazine was stirring up.

I finished the magazine several days before that reading, some of it while on the very long bus ride to UCD and some of it at a new local called Mind the Step, which lets you bring laptops and sit around until nearly midnight. There's huge squishy couches in there and I tend to bring a bag with various books for my dissertation, as well as various enrichment activities to do in between all that not-reading: my knitting and the little skein of red yarn to which it's attached, a book or magazine like HOWL to read instead of the other things I should be reading, a journal. The return of being a hobbyist, a truly focused hobbyist, has hit me with force. When your life gets slow, such as after an international move and a domestic graduation, you start to crave a more familiar tempo. Or at least I do, because I find I lose most of my happiness when I forget to fill life with small to-dos to match the big ones.

This is how I found myself doing the following things over the last few weeks: running voluntary five kilometer 'fun' runs in the Docklands, hosting a Friendsgiving, actually starting the first show I've watched by myself since 2022, and learning to knit. Getting busy on my own terms has been a remarkably rewarding experience. I schedule weeks around philosophy conferences and trips to the sea, around dinner parties and the necessary preparation for dinner parties (rub the turkey the day before, bake the pie the morning of, and then sort out everything else). In Howth a local at a small open-air market stopped me while I was checking out some interesting soap, and he told me to come again in the springtime, when there's more young people about and the air blows warmer. It is comforting to me to know that my Spring is even emptier than my Fall, that my weeks and my weekends are mine to create in a way they never have been before. I've spent so many years getting by because I simply say yes to things without any conscious effort to delineate the worthy and the unworthy, the fulfilling from the expected or required. If it takes blowing a hole in your life plan and moving somewhere with no friends to really show yourself how to choose a life that works, well, it's apparently worth it.

A few nights ago I was standing in a checkout line with a bathroom scale. I was recently prescribed new medication for nerve pain and Mom made me paranoid about it making me gain weight. I figured this was an empirical fact I could either prove or disprove and it made me less anxious to know either way, and anyway I'd need a scale to weigh my bags before flying internationally again. I planned to buy the scale, shove it in my backpack, and head to Mind the Step to get a few things done before my meetings the next morning.

The cashier noticed my California ID and we started talking. Somehow within fifteen minutes I was behind the register at Dunnes explaining exactly how to get from my childhood house to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, because the cashier said his childhood dream was to go to high school in Sherman Oaks. I'm not sure where he got that from but it put me on the spot to both explain my deep-seated love for the Galleria but also tell him the truth, which is that Sherman Oaks is not the coolest place in the entire world and he should rethink his ranking of LA neighborhoods. If I loved California so much, he asked, why did I move to dreary, dull Dublin? This is something everyone asks me, which makes sense. The weather is shit and most of the charm that I find indigenous to cold weather climates and particularly in the Irish context is lost on those who were raised in it. The rate of emigration particularly for citizens under 25 in Ireland is enormous, so the question makes sense: if everyone leaves, why did I come? I said the same answer that I give every time but added that it was an opportunity to completely empty my life out, like shaking a hat full of change upside down, and then start to slowly refill it with things. Fewer things, I hope. That analogy seems to be what I've been up to, picking up coins with a kind of newfound autonomy and particular vision that I've never had. We talked for so long about cities and coasts and international migration that I forgot to go to Mind the Step entirely, and I ended up with a discount on the scale.

I went to a gallery opening recently where we saw lots of pictures and paintings and very smooth rocks. There was an image of a few birds painted thickly with great streaks of blue and white. The piece was called American migrants, and Dorothea insisted she take a photo of it with me standing up in front of it, like it was me in the picture.

When life is emptying out you fill it with all sorts of beautiful things, like art and turkey and people who really matter. I'm still here, in deep November, collecting.

the bird in question (american migrant).