Grace à vous, Jacob Hallerström, a second piece of my writing was published in Stockholm’s L’amour – La Mort literary magazine this year. I visited Jacob in Sweden in 2021, where his friendly community of musicians and Europeans welcomed me surprisingly warmly. I felt like Ginsberg crowned The King of May! I even spent some extra time ambling for falafel with the magazine’s other main editor, the wild poet Jonathan Brott. “Good people,” as our trumpet player Robert Ketcham used to say of one person.

Since the text of this issue, Resenärer (Travelers), is mostly in Swedish and my fellow anglophones/Americans are unlikely to find it, I’m digitizing it here. In fact, I wrote it for a writing prompt in a Teaching Writing class for my K-8 teaching certificate, procrastinating as usual but getting friendly remarks from my classmate:

The Grey Wall from L’amour – La Mort, Nr.13 – Resenärer

The grey wall became part of a song, it became a reference and a symbol for a certain state of mind but before that it was an actual event and an awful and beautiful image that appeared in my own life on a specific day in my early twenties when we were traveling across the country to move to Washington. Away from Ann Arbor and Michigan altogether and to start a new phase of life unmoored, without the ballast of old days and friends and family or places. Maybe that’s why the grey wall was so scary and awesome in the moonlight.

It might’ve been in Utah or Montana or Wyoming — it was somewhere out West and now it’s so tied up and enduring as an idea that even though we never went to Utah that year, it seems it could just as well be a grey wall in Utah that was so awful and beautiful in the moonlight that night. We were descending for what seemed like a very long time, on some long incline that didn’t really matter in terms of length because we were driving ten hours a day no matter what and time wasn’t really the same sort of container it usually is. We just traveled through time like the wide space of the plains that got covered in trillions of pointillated blades of sharp or soft grass and dry mud; we travelled through time like it was a big bathtub filled with empty air. So it may have been an hour we descended and the incline was eerie like we were headed down to Hell, by a sort of optical trick; we were sinking into the earth like we’d fallen for some scheme out of a tourist trap billboard.

We were listening to For Emma, Forever Ago, specifically as a comfort and it was as good as any time I’ve heard it, and just as always in powerful moments I redefined my memory of it; that valley became the new spot in the cache. I got out of the car when we stopped at the bottom and the grey wall was just there in Montana or Wyoming where the light was so bright and pale that the grey wall jumped out at me and Sarah was still in the car and even though I was scared, I was in awe and it quickly became a symbol and a representation of a feeling that was only just starting then but was clear to be a harbinger and an entryway into another era and another thick block of identity isolated in life and untouchable post-fact. I can’t touch it now but I can stand easily at the grey wall in my mind as if it were there — though one feature of it, of being there, is it doesn’t feel like being here, on earth, in this way, in this self, in this time, in this culture, this milieu, this friends-group, this family, this space — it feels like another space, like it’s orbiting what is my life now. And that’s ok — the grey wall is now a dream and I’m grateful to have stood so close.

December 2022
Portland, Maine