In Transit

I’m home after a quick work trip to Manhattan. My plane landed at JFK around 9 pm Monday; I was tucking the girls into their beds at 8:15 Wednesday night.

Every time I go to New York, I think of at least fourteen people I’d like to take a walk or have a meal with, a slow visit in their apartment, a drink together at their local. There’s never enough time, but I like to at least try. This trip, though, I didn’t make any plans.

Seeing as I boarded the plane without a finished draft of the 40-minute speech I’d be giving the next day, I knew I’d spend Tuesday—the only full day I had in the city—frantically writing, editing, and practicing the speech in the morning, delivering it in the afternoon, then socializing all evening with people from the foundation hosting me. All other time would likely be spent horizontal in my hotel bed.

I spent the three days leading up to the trip solo with the girls, something I hadn’t done in a while. It didn’t take long for me to notice that I felt a little rusty, to realize how much more active parenting and day-to-day domestic work Will’s been doing the last two months. And to admit that I’ve been enjoying mothering more lately as a mother who spends a fair amount of time away from home. It was a long weekend—long in all the ways weekends with kids can be, long in the specific ways that make my relationship with Ligaya is probably the most intense and confounding relationship of my life.

I showed up at the airport on Monday afternoon very tender and tired, startled by all the emotions bubbling up in the TSA line, at the special water bottle-filling fountain, amid the sea of unmasked travelers. I teared up and released a torrent of profanities when my carry-on backpack caught (as it always does) on the door of the bathroom stall I was squeezing into.

At my departure gate, I was looking for an empty chair or patch of carpet to sit on when I heard someone call my name. It was my friend Michael, identity obscured by a black KN95 mask and the seven (or more) years since we’d last seen each other. I knew him instantly—the recognition a rogue wave of relief, the familiarity evidence of the old world. I threw my arms around him with a force that startled both of us. The tears I’d be holding in found an easy path out.

I’ve known Michael since I was twenty-one, when I spent the summer of 1999, a fresh college graduate/baby, interning at Copper Canyon Press, an independent poetry press located in a small town on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Copper Canyon is where I met both Michael and Joseph, who have been editing, marketing, generally dedicating their lives to and insisting on poetry’s essentiality to life for coming on thirty years.

I interned at the press in 1999, then came back to work as its publicist somewhere in between 2005 to 2007. Joseph and Michael brought me on staff because they believed in me, that I could bring something new to the press. They probably had more faith in me than I had in myself, and were definitely more generous with me than they needed to be. I was a smart but decidedly chaotic 27/28-year-old with a loose relationship to professionalism. I know objectively that I did not work as well or as much for them as I should have. I also know with certainty that the deeply white, old ass male nonprofit literary culture the press was founded and rooted in at that time didn’t have the ability to fully see me, support me, or allow me to make the job my own and thrive.

Seeing Michael in the airport reminded me that the Press was, and still is, an improbable home to me. Joseph and Michael took me seriously as a person. They knew I was a sharp reader, a good writer, charismatic and capable, communicative, someone to invest in and nurture, to make part of their lives and community.

When I got off the plane at JFK, Michael was waiting for me. It was a given that we’d head in to Manhattan together, grab dinner. We took the AirTrain from JFK to Jamaica Station, waited for each other as we fed credit cards into various machines for our train fares. We transferred to the LIRR to Penn Station, made sure to find seats facing the direction we were traveling in. A conductor came by in one of those boxy hats that delights and strikes me as anachronistic and punched our tickets manually with his shiny silver hole punch. We spread out in our seats and settled into a conversation we’d started years ago.

I used to see myself as the kid and Michael as the grownup. During the train ride I realized that somehow I’d caught up to him. I am now in full possession of the confidence he had in me years ago. I’m not chasing anything, have nothing to prove. We were listening to and learning from each other in equal measure. We are both as knowledgable and clueless as ever.

I should say the Press will always be a home to me, too, because it gave me a life dependent on poetry. I may not be reading volumes of poetry regularly, but I always come back to it, fragments of poems are generally present in my ambient thoughts. Poetry is where I go for pure expression, verbal and somatic. What I return to when I need to find rhythm and physicality in language. When I need a reminder to realign with my gut, not fear my emotional reactions, resist the urge to make meaning from everything, trust perceiving can be enough.

Ever since my little journey on the LIRR, I’ve been thinking of “what was said at the bus stop” by Danez Smith. Part of the ordinary miracle of New York is all the public transportation which, as someone who lives in Seattle and drives everyday, makes me absolutely WILD—all the people, smells, shared space, humanity!! (I’m romanticizing, yes, let me live.) Every subway station I walked past, every bus brake squeal, it all kept delivering me back to this poem. I’m quite sure this the best poem ever written about public transportation, but if you have others I should consider, please send them my way. I pulled Homie off the shelf after I put the girls to bed and want to share it with you.

what was said at the bus stop

lately has been a long time
says the girl from Pakistan, Lahore to be specific
at the bus stop when the white man
ask her where she’s from & then
says oh, you from Lahore?
it’s pretty bad over there lately.

lately has been a long time
she says & we look at each other & the look says
yes, i too wish dude would stop
asking us about where we from
but on the other side of our side eyes
is maybe a hand where hands do no good
a look to say, yes, i know lately has been
a long time for your people too
& i’m sorry the world is so good at making
us feel like we have to fight for space
to fight for our lives

“solidarity” is a word, a lot of people say it
i’m not sure what it means in the flesh
i know i love & have cried for my friends
their browns a different brown than mine
i’ve danced their dances when taught
& tasted how their mothers miracle the rice
different than mine. i know sometimes
i can’t see beyond my own pain, past black
& white, how bullets love any flesh.
i know it’s foolish to compare.
what advice do the drowned have for the burned?
what gossip is there between the hanged & the buried?

& i want to reach across our great distance
that is sometimes an ocean & sometimes centimeters
& say, look. your people, my people, all that has happened
to us & still make love under rusted moons, still pull
children from the mothers & name them
still teach them to dance & your pain is not mine
& is no less & is mine & i pray to my god your god
blesses you with mercy & i have tasted your food & understand
how it is a good home & i don’t know your language
but i understand your songs & i cried when they came
for your uncles & when you buried your niece
i wanted the world to burn in the child’s brief memory
& still, still, still, still, still, still, still, still, still
& i have stood by you in the soft shawl of morning
waiting & breathing & waiting