on the road pt. 3

“The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something – a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.” – Paul Theroux

First semester of graduate school and my professor asks us to state our name and where home is. These literary-soaked strangers name places on the west coast, in the middle and a few from the south. I hadn’t lived in many places, but none really felt like home to me and what does home even look like. So instead, I thought about the place I knew the best but felt at home in the least: my body. My professor was not impressed, a little confused and asked about a place on the map. I said it again: my body. He made that sound men make when they just want you to concede.

We collect stamps in passport books and catalogue our trophies from everywhere we’ve traveled: post cards, shot glasses, magnets, t-shirts. But what about the markings on a body. That bullet-shaped hole beside my knee from challenging, beautiful, love-soaked canoe trip in Canada; blisters on feet from all that walking in Amsterdam; sunburn and hair loss and sore throat and those pants from that thrift store.

What will be discovered today? What will be lost? What will be mailed back? Someone will say a prayer for a part of the body that never felt like it belonged, so trained hands will scalpel and remove and sew and send home a body that now looks familiar, only bloodied and bruised and tender and right.

Someone else will stand beside that person and wonder what else can be removed. Wonder if one can create a gofundme page for a brain that is soaked in sadness.

Many years later and “my body” is still the answer when asked about where home is. Welcome mat long gone (did it ever exist?), windows stained, door hinges rusty and squeaked, quite a bit of hoarding. No, I guess there is no map with my body’s coordinates plainly presented, but not everything that we (want to) believe in can be seen.

 

in defense of.

“What needs to be defended in writing is what’s offensive.”   –Charles BernsteinI travel with a poet through six states toward a place where there are five banks within five blocks and when I ask where the best place to get a cup of coffee, I am answered with: “7-11.”

We are here for a poetry festival and I feel as far from NYC as one can.

At the University where everything is happening, we go to a Q&A with three editors and hear what not to do as writers. They end it early, so they can catch the art reception happening upstairs in the library where there will be free cookies and crackers. The artist speaks only briefly because she needs to catch a plane and is waiting for her driver to pick her up.

I start to wonder why we are here.

Suddenly,  it is suppertime and the only happening place to eat is a Mexican restaurant, but they serve hotdogs, so we head to the cafeteria with three other poets.

Seven dollars to get in and it’s ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT.

As we eat, one poet asks about censorship. How do you know when to hold back what you say? Like, not say something because it could offend someone?

I think about all the rooms I’ve listened to others and all the rooms I’ve shared with others. We could go around and ask about trigger warnings and words to stay away from and gestures that are offensive, but that may leave us in silence.

I told him that if you make someone angry or make someone ecstatic, it’s all the same. You’ve made someone feel with your words. Isn’t that what you want? I asked.

Another poet added that if you feel compelled to read something, then go ahead. If there is urgency, give it space to roam.

Today, I take the stage and suck up my allotted twenty minutes. I think about what stirs me and these infamous trigger warnings.

I just want to feel something. I want you to cause me to write. I want you to give me more words to expand my vocabulary. I want you to cause me to question what I know.