The Reading

He reads at a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon in October — not his coffee shop, someone else’s, a place in the South End that he has driven past a dozen times and not been in. He parks and walks to the door and goes inside the way he goes into all new spaces: scanning first, orienting, finding the exit, finding the table he would choose if he had a choice.

There is a microphone set up near the window. A small crowd — maybe twenty people — arranged in chairs. He had not known there would be a reading. He had come in for coffee. He takes a coffee to the back and stands against the wall and listens.

The poet is reading from a collection about her grandmother. The poems are in two languages, Spanish and English, and she moves between them with the ease of someone for whom both are native, which they are, which the poems make clear. He does not speak Spanish. He can hear the rhythm and the shape of it and

the emotion that lives in the sounds before the translation arrives.

He stands at the back for forty-five minutes.

When it is over he does not go up to her. He is not a person who goes up to other writers after readings to say: I am also a writer. He knows how those conversations feel from the writer’s side. He leaves the space for the people who have come specifically for her.

He drives home.

The notebook opens.

He writes about what it felt like to stand at the back of a room and listen to a poet move between two languages as if the movement itself was the poem. He writes about what it means to have two languages — not just linguistically but internally, the way trauma creates its own language that runs alongside the language everyone else uses, and the work is the translation between them.

He writes four pages without stopping.

He reads them back.

He keeps all four.

* * *

He has read at seven venues in his career. Bookstores, libraries, a college campus, the

coffee shop on Main Street where the owner gave him an hour on a Sunday afternoon and five people came.

He does not read often. The readings require something from him that is different from the writing — a willingness to be in the room with his own words, to hear them aloud in his own voice, to watch people’s faces as they receive them. He finds this useful and uncomfortable in equal measure. Useful because hearing the words aloud reveals things about them that the page conceals. Uncomfortable because the room is other people and other people are where the vigilance lives.

He prepares for readings carefully. He chooses the order of the pieces with the attention of someone who understands that order is meaning — that a piece that lands one way when it follows one poem lands differently when it follows another, that the arc of a reading is its own argument.

He reads slowly. Not affectedly slowly — deliberately, with the pacing of someone who wants the words to arrive one at a time, to have the space they need to do what they are trying to do.

He looks up from the page more than most poets do. He learned this from watching other readers — the ones who read with their eyes down are not in the room with the audience, are in their own private experience of the text. He wants to be in the room. He wants to see the faces.

The faces are why he does it.

* * *

He drives to a library in Chicopee on a Thursday evening in September for a reading he almost cancels.

He almost cancels because the week has been bad and the body is depleted and the prospect of performing functioning for an hour in front of strangers is more than his energy budget feels like it can accommodate. He does not cancel because: he said he would. He does not cancel commitments. He has been not canceling commitments since he was nineteen and he does not intend to start now.

He drives to Chicopee. He finds the library. He parks.

He sits in the car for two minutes.

He does the breathing. In four, hold four, out six.

He goes inside.

There are eleven people in the chairs. He reads for forty-five minutes. He reads eight pieces from four different collections, the order he planned on the drive over, adjusted twice during the reading when he felt the room and understood that the order needed to change.

Afterward a woman comes up to him. She is older, mid-sixties, and she holds her copy of A Personal Note: The PTSD Talks with the specific care of something that has been read multiple times. She says: my son has PTSD. He won’t talk to me about it. I read your book trying to understand. I think I understand now.

He says: I’m glad.

She says: thank you for not making it easier than it is.

He says: I couldn’t.

She nods. She goes.

He stands at the podium for a moment after everyone has left.

He goes back to the car.

He sits for five minutes.

He drives home.

He feeds the cats.

He turns to a new page.

He writes about the woman and the son. He writes: This is the work. The woman who reads the book trying to understand the son. The son who will not talk. The book that does the talking for both of them, that stands in the gap between them and says: here, this is what it is, this is what it costs, this is why the conversation is hard.

He keeps the entry.

He closes the notebook.

He goes to bed.

He sleeps better than he has all week.

* * *

He has been published by five presses, including his own.

The economics of each have been different, the relationships have been different, the degree of control he has retained has been different. He has learned from all of them, including the ones that did not go the way he hoped.

The press that lost the books — not all of them, some of them, a print run that was supposed to arrive in November and arrived in February — taught him to build in lead time and to never assume that someone else’s timeline is his timeline. The press that changed his title

without asking — the book was called Heavy and they published it as The Weight because the sales team thought Heavy was too bleak — taught him to get everything in writing and to negotiate title rights explicitly.

The imprint he built himself, Enrico Port, is the consequence of those lessons. He built it because the alternative was to keep navigating other people’s systems and he is not good at that, has never been good at that, finds the politics of institutional publishing actively counterproductive to the work.

He is not anti-collaboration. He is not anti- publisher. He is pro-control over his own work, which is different.

He built the infrastructure because the infrastructure he needed did not exist.

He is building WordVerse for the same reason.

He will build whatever else needs building.

He has always built what is not available.

He lifts the pen.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The cost is time.

Writing time given over to distribution, to logistics, to the machinery of getting the work out. He resents this imperfectly. He does it anyway. Because the work has to reach people or it is only half itself.

The pen is back in his hand.

The pen moves.

He holds the pen still and looks.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. Not yet editing. First: is this the right thing? Is it going the right direction? Is the language alive? He reads it back slowly. The day is somewhere else now. The apartment has gone quiet. He rolls his neck. Breathes. Ghost opens one eye from the couch. Closes it. Vincent puts his hands flat on the desk. He looks at what is there. The language survives the moment that made it necessary. That is why he does this.

That is why he does not stop. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

The pen comes up.

He puts down the next line.

He writes. He always writes.