There’s nothing like being sad in a new city. I drink mulled wine in a deluge. The air bites. The snow storms. And I’m a poet. I duck into an underpass and come out on the other side of a busy street. The tops of buildings disappear into a deep purple abyss.
Inbox intimates, thank you for joining me for the penultimate newsletter of 2023. We’ve reached our Jesus year.
In mid-November, I flew to Warsaw for the fifth annual Marxist Feminist conference. The experience was surreal. I posed for a group ceasefire photo with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, learned about Amazon warehouse workers organizing in Poland, and marveled at simultaneous language interpretation. I let questions I never gave voice to bloom in my mouth during Q & A sessions, ate pierogis, and took photos of slides. I read poems and showed a photo essay in a convention room.
Academic conferences used to do more for me. Or maybe I used to do more for them. The format sometimes feels stifling now, but I like what happens in the spaces between.
During a session break, I took a car across the city to an industrial part of town. The driver didn’t speak English, and I ended up wandering around buildings with no signal as snow dumped onto my head.
I was looking for the Neon Museum. Poland’s first—dedicated to the documentation and preservation of cold war era neon signs. Neon, otherwise known as hope, otherwise known as gaseous ways forward. Neon the element. Neon the feeling.
“Neon designers were poets of space. Each neon sign was a small technological marvel” — Wiesława Łobos (1945-2021)
I’ve often written about “city at night” feelings. The sense of possibility and presence embedded in a place after dark. Neon signs and their auras augment that sensation.
Neon is a harbinger of vice, of pleasure, of a good time. Of the sensuousness in looking. Strip clubs, casinos, bars, diners, theaters. Lamps for the wide-eyed moth of us.
In the museum, small as it was, I was overwhelmed. The large letters and their typefaces hummed intrusively. Bright elements of a city compressed into one space, a densely packed archive, the hot core of a star.
With no filler, no black buildings or stretches of asphalt between these elements, they felt a little sad to me—all of these bright, colorful signs out of their contexts. Removed from the vastness of the nights they were meant to illuminate. Shut off after hours instead of pointing to a place you could go during them.
There was a special exhibit on women designers of neon in Poland. Creators such as Krystyna Kołodziej who were “driven primarily by the desire to beautify reality.” There were notes on the importance of typeface, color, and letterforms to ensure legibility.
Some of the enormous letters were for sale. I thought about what I would do with a giant neon letter in my tiny apartment. Instead of a Christmas tree, a neon letter perhaps.
After filling myself sufficiently with light and neon facts, I went back to my hotel for a final panel of the day. A solo vegetarian dinner, a frigid night walk, and I returned to watch the street below from my dark room.
A canonical book for me as a child was Only the Cat Saw – an illustrated series of scenes on a farm unfolding for a cat’s eyes only. The cat is a neutral witness to these secret, intimate pockets in spacetime. At the end, the little girl takes up the mantle of looking. She sees something the cat doesn’t see, because the cat is sleeping.
I wrapped myself in a blanket and peered out the ceiling to floor window. I thought of the cat and also the comforting glow of the photography work of Todd Hido.
I watched the part of the hotel that wrapped around at a 90 degree angle and I saw someone ironing. A window a few floors down revealed two figures veiled by a red curtain. Someone sitting on the bed, someone kneeling in front. They were having a conversation. From my perch, only darkness.
When I have to ride out the drifts, the spirals, and sharp eddies of emotional tumult, the encroaching darkness in a city where no one knows me, I try to remember: The despair will pass, the charge will dissipate, but the things seen, witnessed, felt…those are for keeps.
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Creative Updates:
We have just rounded the halfway point in the crowdfunding campaign for The Holy Hour: An Anthology on Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine. Coming in on our final stretch: the last quarter!!! Kickstarter campaigns are all or nothing! If we don’t reach our goal, the project will not receive any of the pledges. If you have the means to support this project, please do! Any amount helps and sharing helps too!
My chapbook, Miradouros (a love letter to the viewpoints of Lisbon and an ode to the comfort of looking) was selected as a finalist (out of over a thousand submissions!) in the Driftwood Press Adrift Chapbook contest. Congratulations to the winner, and all of the finalists. A deconstructed, multimedia version of the chap can be found over on the paid tier of this newsletter!
A song I have on repeat:
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As always, thank you for spending a slice of your day with me. It truly means the world. This monthly missive will always be a free offering. If you would life to support my work further, you can subscribe to my paid tier, or donate to The Holy Hour kickstarter. <3 <3 <3