At a bus station cafe in Spain, a bartender wrestles the dishes;
Blue fabric flowers blossom from a vase by the door;
It’s cold all over Spain today, the weathercaster says;
The friend presses a phone to the flower of her ear and listens to the tone;
The friend is homesick and depressed and I feel no help at all;
So that’s how to refill a napkin dispenser;
In the city I left, the man I love is deciding to build a pinhole camera;
Peach! Plum! Watermelon! the slot machine chimes out of its dark corner;
A boy is going to jail for convincing other boys to cut shapes into their skin;
The man has a decision to make, our new life or returning to the old;
Bowl of red bean soup, uncovered;
Decades of smoke wait to emerge from wall and seat cushions;
All summer the man sits on the same couch and either calls or waits for my call;
Time fast forwards when the bartender sneezes; rain falls;
Women turn newspapers into ink-dense umbrellas;
Through binoculars, a girl watches a magnificent pigeon eat from another girl’s hand;
The friend calls home, forges the sound of the dial tone with her mouth, a low guttering hum;
Drawn into the room, the voice of the operator, tired, full of salt;
No pinhole camera is ever built;
He calls me;
My body is adrift at the bar, a wedge of lemon bright in seltzer;
He doesn’t call;
A cyclist killed, an argument, a metal barricade;
My hands two open pages in my lap;
He calls me;
The woman in the Dove commercial turns off the water to lather;
My lap a garden grown snarled and tired of waiting;
Now I know we’re far from home;
My body adrift at the bar;
The bartender shatters a wine glass that hung by one slendering stem;
By its fifth repetition, I’m beginning to understand the morning news;
One dark cartoon cloud settles over Spain’s right shoulder;
The friend comes back from the phone holding rain in her throat;
The forgotten worry resurfaces: the pain the man feels is not the pain I think he feels;
I call him, imagine I’m speaking through roses, imagine a bouquet in my mouth;
In the town where we’re going, it has never rained;
Alison Braid-Fernandez lives and writes in London, England. Recent work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, West Branch, and The Massachusetts Review.
Questions and Answers
Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful (e. g. books, films, art, websites, etc.)?
In an interview with Granta, the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt says: “Any art requires both pattern and variation.” Lynda Barry’s book, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, helps me to find my own patterns; the prompts on woodlandpattern.org help me to find variation. Syllabus contains the course plan and writing exercises from Barry’s writing workshop for non-writers, called Writing the Unthinkable. Barry asks writers to notice the world around them, and then to notice what kinds of things they notice. I follow the exercises in the book—both for writing and for drawing—in order to make space in my day for deep attentiveness (as well as play). woodlandpattern.org teamed up with the Milwaukee Public Library to publish “Prompts Against Anxiety” during the pandemic – there are 40 prompts by different poets and creatives that disrupt my process and help me to discover a new entry point to my writing.
How did the writing process unfold around this poem? How did you write, edit, and refine it?
I spent a summer backpacking through northern Spain. A lot of time was spent in transit; on buses and trains, or waiting for buses and trains. I filled four or five notebooks over the course of the summer, mostly making notes about what I saw happening around me. These notes eventually became the entry point for this poem. Initially, the poem focused entirely on the external world unfolding around the speaker; those were the notes I had made in my notebook while waiting for the bus. Later on, I realized I was avoiding the internal landscape of the speaker—it felt safe, keeping them as an emotionless observer, but the poem didn’t work. I tried weirding the poem, making it surreal. I tried playing with the form. This poem exists as a sestina, in couplets, as a prose piece. Then I read Arthur Sze, and listened to a podcast where he spoke about the importance of non-hierarchical language in his work. I realized part of why I had been avoiding the internal landscape of the speaker was because I felt that in my own work, emotion could often take over the poem. I tried revising the poem using single lines and filtering back in the emotions, imagining that each line held the same weight, that each moment was happening simultaneously. I owe its form entirely to Arthur Sze.