Issue 34: Kat Addis

   San Francisco

I was on a train in the recent past. It was grey green inside, and it was shooting through a wet city woken up from a dream of itself, a place that has claimed to be different but those with prophetic vision have always seen the sameness in people putting each other to rest at the mercy of water.

Above the ground an investor in the nation’s oldest restaurant noted a contradiction between her values and her imperatives. Targeted medicine is big.

A man outside was barking at a dog as if he would win and there was some truth in that although it is hard to articulate without slipping into pictures. Best not to be artful.

In the corner café opposite the laundromat a person’s body broke into song. Minutes dripped from the wet flannel in the proprietary hand. The others smiled in brief contact; the singer was spectacular. What was wanted in that café was attention, a kind of stability, family history. Sirens in their hands.

On the train I had seen the end of the world. I took comfort in the sweet smell of the man in front of me, the slick hair under the band of his cap. The comfort was vivid.

His hair curled under the realisation. The rain got heavier. The city was empty from the start. Worst of all was the bar where the poets used to hang out. My path there waymarked by security guards in marble lobbies. They had agreed to go on existing as emphasis. No bodies can now fill up the space given how it was created. Occasional chords rang out of their mouths in unison.

The train got me from place to place but I was still missing something. I reached dangerous fatigue, where a woman was having her small head swallowed by a large baseball cap.

At this point bundles of clothes were being contradicted by the bodies inside them. Bodies were contradicted by uniforms contradicted by badges contradicted by names, and in comparison to all of this a hose was a direct unit of expression. A hose to the face was a straightforward line of communication.

Someone put the chopsticks on the table and they were covered in white powder. They laughed. During the night a piece of lace dropped to the floor. During the night a gust of wind became solid in the room. It was giants running through the corridor. It was a naked man in the corridor saying ‘I am too hot, and you don’t know what I’ve been through.’

Moving through this place was like reading a poem in a hopeful mood and failing to understand it until syntactical discord, inevitable in the absence of context, began making music that surpassed all understanding and what was understandable cringed in shame.

The drains of the city were completely full. The big bus tours were empty windows staring at flocks of birds. There were then two people in the city. The first walked across the rumbling tracks and turned around to beckon the second. ‘You ok?’ The second was old enough to have misplaced his life. They were not walking together, nor had this ever been likely. It was more that the first was concerned that the second lacked clarity, and the rumbling of the tracks prefaced something coming that could knock him down. The second nodded. He was crossing the road in a different way, that’s all, not in a straight line from side to side but in a bow. By doing it like this he would cross two roads at once. The movement explained itself unhurriedly. I went into the coffee shop and leant my head against the window. The whole thing seemed worthy of study and in the days to come I would think of it often under the heading of misunderstandings of movement tending to pre-emptive care. The second person walked past the window close enough that I could see their filed sharp fingernails.

I added that last part in order that you could see the sorts of things I cannot understand. These things of course do not define me any more than they do you. Pain; verbal, mental, or visual pictures of roses, the incredible loneliness of youth and age. There was also a woman I saw in a café who was myself in the future wearing a red beret and riding a giant spider. She was peeping at me ostentatiously from behind the pillar. She was writing my portrait in her notebook. She was eating a demure soup and it hit me then that in more than one way I will need bread to get on in life.

That night, the police having been deprived of their sport by an ablative absolute, the citizens took up the hoses into their own hands. A juvenile violence that no powder clinging to a chopstick or parade of giants would have excused. The doorman sat beside me re-enacting Tom Baker as Doctor Who. He laughed at the punchlines with his entire body but he was too generous with meaning and never started at the beginning of the joke. ‘Would you like a jelly baby? Well, a simple no thank you would have been sufficient!’ My left eye was stinging now with the effort. On the back wall a celebrity informed a talk-show host about the houses of the super-rich. ‘I like things that are mushy and comfortable, like rooms’.

The train terminated in the art gallery. I was insulted by the way that Matisse paints other people’s chins. If you want to paint your own chins like that, that’s one thing. Brash and tolerant inside a blue rhombus. There were many pictures of an anxious mind, of relation refused or accepted in line and colour, gouache on paperboard oil transfer. Pferd und Mann, Sibylle, Nearly Hit. Red pulled into the centre at the point where the head dissects the neck, impertinent arrows directing my sight as if I didn’t already know that eyes have that kind of force. Unformed creatures living on top of anguished purple and the hellfire yellow of renaissance paintings, despair grey, obvious white. I stand against this silly comic wriggling of bodies in reverse uniforms. It reveals too much. Sargent Jonson’s Forever Free had the children flattened under their mother’s arms away from things they cannot even begin to imagine. Dali had a sky-high bleeding toe at the beach, the eggshell crashing into the room of dark blood with ceramic floors, which is not half mushy. It’s the end. But the moment never was.

Kat Addis is a British Academy Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex, where she is writing about sixteenth-century European epic poems. She has published one book of poems called Space Parsley (the87press, 2021), a chapbook titled The Song of the Fucking Rose (slub press, 2023), and another chapbook, Headgear, is forthcoming with Selva Oscura press. She has published poems in magazines and journals including Blackbox Manifold, the Chicago Review, and Poetry. 

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