Artist's Date #12: Litquake's “Exalted Verse” Night
poetry reading at Grace Cathedral (SF)
I’m early for a poetry reading at Grace’s Cathedral and I’m having a glass of red wine in a hotel ballroom nearby, because the tasting room is closed. The dining hall around me is empty and summons a thousand ghosts. It smells like old money; each table surrounded by velvet chairs, laid out on a thick rug with an indescribable pattern. Everything feels like it was, at one time, expensive, but was willing now, to die out rather than to become something new. I’m drinking by myself and I’m loving it. “Are you staying at the hotel,” the sever asks, and the question is so provocative to me, though it’s just logistical to him. There’s bad music playing over badly placed speakers, but it doesn’t matter — there’s no hotel room that doesn’t hold a place in my heart. I like that feeling that I could be anyone, anywhere, it has an endless quality to it, rather than the identity of being a mom, in an apartment, with a kid who needs you to be just the one thing for her that she’s decided to conjure. Both are a kind of shapeshifting but one is more lauded. I want to be the other; the one that is feared.
The simple truth is, I think to myself, as I leave the lobby and step out into the fresh air, that I love being alone and doing whatever I want.
I have the sudden urge to smoke a cigarette as I smell someone else smoking by the entrance. I’m close by the cathedral which is lucky because somehow I’m drunk from one glass of wine and have a taste of that reckless feeling, like the one that causes a person to accidentally loose her way. As I cross the street, the pavement buzzes — the electricity from the trolly car that just passed sending vibrations through the metal tracks that linger as it clangs down the street. It feels a little old time-y up there, and there’s another big hotel, these dinosaurs, on their way to extinction. There’s a whole other brownstone, with ivy on big wooden doors — very fancy, it looks like through the glass, and also still closed, post-pandemic, like a frozen wealth or a boxed up museum diamond.
I’m wearing this jacket that looks like a tuxedo. Even though, in the bathroom mirror, at the hotel, it had been clear it was ill fitting, it felt well suited to me when I wore it outside. The long back of it flowed behind me in a slightly victorian way, and it had the quality of being both male and female, like a riding coat to be worn over a long dress, on a horse through the trees. San Francisco is no forest but the whole city is still new to me, even after a year, and so there’s still a bit of danger and possibility present in it being a place that’s unknown.
I’m still early and there’s a steakhouse nearby and there’s nothing more than I want to do in than eat read meat and get drunker and I pop my head in and wow to myself at strange portal. I had texted with my friend that day, about how much we both wanted to feel like something other than who their partners and kids see them as, and I can see my futile attempt to live in another body for the course of one night. I make some jokes at the bar and the bartender and one guest have a short argument about the private club nearby and whether it is definitely or definitely not a meeting place for masonic members. I’m eating shrimp cocktail through the beginning of the reading, because I might be a little afraid of the performance. I worry that the speakers will have that way of giving the end of a phrase more emphasis and never letting any sentence have a period, at least as it sounded to me. But soon, the one drink has worn off and I’m just a regular person in a strange coat who is late.
Across the street, at the steps of the cathedral, there’s this fucking guy and he’s launching enormous bubbles into the dark night and they are floating up in front of the arches of the entrance and I’m trying to take picture of them and in all the picture the bubbles are barely visible but form real life iridescent alien shapes that chase up after each other toward what must be the moon.
Inside, Amanda Moore is reading a beautiful poem about not taking her daughter surfing and pretending not to hear her daughter cry over a broken heart, before AA Vincent just absolutely burns up the place with poem that sounds like it’s being delivered by a futuristic vampire. I do not understand the story, what-so-ever, but that is of no importance to it’s overall strength. Shelley Wong reads about not-belonging in space except, always, on a dance floor and Saaed Jones, the final reader, did not make the reading, and the introducer does their best with his work. It is strange that without the writer being there, I can not remember his poem.
At the end of the night, I write a bad poem just to remember the feeling of the church basement.
Why does a church always smell like a church
What is it about god that needs so much space
Why is an empty bathroom creepier than one that is full
Why does a dark room with a glossy floor and a flickering green light
mean something scary is coming
What is it that hides in these unknown spaces
Why do they summon the imagination to take a strange turn
Outside the smell of a cigarette makes me wonder if I’m I just around the corner from disappearing, like the edge of that curl of smoke, at once there and then not