Ceri Morgan

San Francisco Sigh

Ding. "Next stop, Chinatown. Little Italy, Union Square." The Mason-Powell line. "Everybody gets off on the trolley." The rattle and rumble. "Hold on, now! Left turn!" Mai Wen Beauty Parlour. Hilton Hotel. Macy’s, Barneys, Walgreens and Nordstrom. Super Bargain Basement. Uniqlo. Down coats, silk slippers, parasols, and fans. Sweaters and deodorants in racks and rows. Easels on Washington Square. Artisanal jewellery, millinery, patisserie.  "We all have hard times sometimes." Hand-written menus pasted onto walls. Turnip, chrysanthemum, a deconstructed cauliflower. "Need prosthesis." Won ton, tacos, chowder and gelato. Crabs stacked on stalls on Fisherman’s Wharf. Cars sliding by in the dark. Del Monte, Ghiradelli shucked for shopping. Sea lions loll on the pier. A Monterey memory: warm bodies, distilled fish, and the gag in my throat. "There’s more than one way to smell," Nina tells me. Breathing in trees on a Muir Woods morning.  "No seafood left here," says the guide. Airport to downtown at 3am, shuffling streets peppered with people. Kelp forests. Muttering aloud in the middle of the road. Udon, nopales: slippery and bitter. Man with leg stumps on show. The cable-car queue looks elsewhere. Hoppy Hops, Sauvignon, Anchor Steam Beer. A fifteen-dollar glass of wine. A two million-dollar houseboat. The police cars roll up and down. "What controls the speed? I do!" The driver grasps the lever. The sole woman conductor as strong as any man. Gripping and grinning, the judder through the body. Golden Gate glimpsed in the hollows of streets. An owl hoots. Hoot and howl. City Lights Bookstore – "take a book, sit and read." A homeless ex-marine dreams of Oxbridge. "Zoopolis." Metropolis. Hobopolis. Scratch that: insulting and nostalgic at the same time. Or reclaim it: riding the rails with Riding the Rails, Josée Yvon’s lesbian hobos in mind. The chill sea mist and the regular commuters. I’m the only one who pays.  Beautiful Wheat Field Bakery. "I won’t lie, it’s for beer." San Francisco, I love-hate you. I walk past, I don’t see. I’m ashamed of myself, yet I’m falling for you: shadows of Victorian bays tracking my skin, cedar leaves puncturing pavements and veins. Maupin, Solnit, Giscombe and Halebsky. Hejinian signs her name. Seven-dollar fare in my pocket. "No coins."   

**

A version of this poem was included in Coordinates Society.

**

Unstuck

Sigh of chrysanthemum city. Whispered plea scratched on a menu. I slide in obscurity to loll on the pier, sea lion stink in my nose. I find solace in the rhythm of discomfort. Leaving the crab stalls on Fisherman’s Wharf, I walk agitated streets looking inwards, talk fiction with homeless ex-marines. Unsee signs of loneliness, restlessness, rootlessness to jump on the trolley, the Powell-Mason line. Cling on as we clatter up and down hills, Golden Gate glimpsed between skyscrapers. The conductor grins as she grips the lever, sole woman working the rails. Ding! "Next stop, Little Italy." Gelato and Bolognese. A vino da tavola costs 15 bucks - dang! Dysphagia (b)looms, but I swallow and focus, join a Muir Woods excursion while the trees still stand. Thoughts run ahead of my words, (s)tumble into frantic Morse code. Scramble and scrumple, sling out to Sun Valley, watch the trash pile high. A mezzo-soprano, I can no longer sing, voice scorched to exhausted embers. I think of kelp forests, a beach bonfire, a waiter bringing me grilled fish. Mon chou-fleur, j’ai honte de moi. A haunting shame like ancient hinges. It reminds me that I am alive.*

**

*This poem was written following an experiment with AI: aware of the impact of AI on translation and creative writing, I used Google Translate to translate "San Francisco Sigh" into French, my second language. I translated the result back into English and fed this version into Copilot, requesting a free verse poem. I used the generated poem as a challenge, trying to include as many as I could have its occasionally jarring phrases and images. My final poem embraces the playful and creative aspects of translation, shadowing or haunting the "original." A collage poem, the title makes a play on "coller" (to stick).

**

Botanical Gardens, Montreal

"Descente dans le magique."1 Yesterday,2 I walked to the metro, tracking front gardens tumbling with pumpkins. I put up my hood as wind sharpened near the station, mumbled through my scarf when asked the time. Swiping through a turnstile, I waited for the train’s three-note refrain, remembering an afternoon spent underground. In photographs, I’m laughing in the dress bought at Fripe-prix, aquamarine against Beaudry’s mushroom tiles. Your head’s fuzzy in one picture, caught mid-turn as you moved to kiss my cheek. Yesterday, I put my hand to my face, found a seat in the carriage, took my book from my bag to sketch once more the route driven by Elle, cutting across Sherbrooke with blue hair piled high. Fifty minutes on, I met my date at Pie IX, nightfall in his violet eyes. Strolling by dragons, persimmon, and cranes, we paused to eat cakes – probably bean curd, I didn’t catch their name. Words were f(l)ailing, I was losing my nerve, shrinking and paling in the reflection from the pond where He Luo Yu poised to take flight as a bird. Lights played in the Japanese and First Nations Gardens against maple, poplar and birch. Yesterday, I understood I was falling in love with him, pressed my lips to his, found my tongue. "Les mots changent de cours’."3 Mon amour, let’s unmap this city, blow it wide open with desire. Dream, drift, scritch-scratch and scribble-scrabble. "Halluciner une écriture."4

**

1. Nicole Brossard, French Kiss (Montréal: Quinze, 1980 [Éditions du Jour, 1974]), 30.
2.  See Nicole Brossard, Hier (Montréal: Éditions Québec/Amérique, 2001), and Andrée Maillet, Les Remparts de Québec (Montréal: les Éditions du Jour, 1965).
3.  Brossard, French Kiss, 56.
4.  Brossard, French Kiss, 61.

**

Waiting for the Glan(cynon Inn) to Reopen

Some nights, I wake up warm, ease myself back to dreams with thoughts of cool. Of weekends working at my local pub on the bank of the river Cynon. Of dipping into the ice machine, dripping melting cubes into sweating shots of Mirage or Taboo. In our twenties, my colleagues and I dressed up at New Year’s, took compliments from customers, laughed as the youngest dropped a third tray of glasses, her foot hooked on the lip of a warped cellar step. Applause and a cheer and the bump and bumble of hip and shoulder and costumes and sipping and talking. A welcome chill through the night’s velvet windows. At the end of the night, staff sat to chat, our elderly manager miming hand-picking under pool tables or hacking up tales of villagers whose family trees spread from Maescynon to Penywaun. My parents weren’t local: a teacher’s daughter, most miners thought me a snob. I stared at them shyly beneath a strip of permed fringe. The Tower is my colliery, I told a Stoke friend. He understood, even if the mine’s now a zip-line. My sisters and I will whizz down it one day, one day soon, very soon.  

**

Ceri Morgan is Professor of Place-writing and Geohumanities at Keele University, UK. She writes prose-poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical-creative texts. Ceri uses writing and other creative practices to make new place-art with individuals and communities outside universities. She has published prose-poems and creative nonfiction in New Welsh Reader, annie journal, NAWE Writing in Education, Forge Zine, Nightingale and Sparrow, and Geohumanities.   ​