March 1st: Allie Rigby
This is not a shipwreck, but a time capsule1. Here is what I did, ate, pondered, etc. A good container. A ship. Not this paragraph, but the idea to create a vessel for 2025. To offer people red, blue, and yellow Lego blocks and say, “build something.”
All writers need containers, especially the miserable ones. I was miserable earlier this month, but I don’t want to write about that. At this moment–with this container–there is a pocket of clean hope. Like a good marble I want to keep.
This is a container as all good things are. Colorful M&Ms in a plastic box, tucked side by side, ten boxes wide and ten tall. In theory, today I tabled at the Los Angeles Zine Fest, connecting with artists, advocates, and change-makers who believe in climate action and social progress.
In reality, I stayed home all day, living in the intertidal zone of my mind, stepping outside a few times to clean my cat’s litterbox or chat with a friend on the phone. My publisher missed the deadline to apply to the zine festival this year, hence my not being there. I found this deadline-trouble relatable and funny. I am forgetting things this year too, missing deadlines right and left. And so, as I was not tabling on this foggy Saturday, I decided to stop procrastinating and start packing my suitcases.
This rock is a good rock. I’d like it to be in the time capsule, too.
In one last, valiant attempt at procrastination, I called a friend. Friends this month have saved my ass. We weighed the personal, social, and environmental news on one hand and then the other. We talked David Lynch and deserts, aging and climate action, overwhelm and call scripts, law school and Spotify blends, book clubs and frog songs, communication breakdowns and breakups, online dating and work woes, creativity and cabbage soup… it is in the dense random moments that I love them the most2.
Collage by Julia Edith Rigby, from her album/performance/opera, Fever Dream, the precursor to Sea Cave Breathing.
Last week, people gathered in a virtual space for a listening party of Sea Cave Breathing by Julia Edith Rigby. It only occurred to me after the first two compositions that this was a different album, not at all related to Fever Dream, her other recent release. At that time, it also occurred to me that the live chatbox was visible to everyone in the room, and that I should be more professional in my correspondences, but I was too giddy to take further action on that thought. That’s what happens when so many people from different parts of your life gather in a space together. It can make you giddy.
Yesterday, my younger brother and I talked for an hour and a half on the phone. Phones are wonderful capsules, not for texting, but for calling. As a geriatric millennial, texting has faded into the fog for me. Now I love a cold call. And I dislike how work makes such calls less frequent–makes many things less frequent.
From twelve until nine p.m., I packed. That was it. I placed books of poetry into beds of denim pants, white tees, black sweaters, and grey overalls. I wondered if I always dressed this plain or if I was merely going through a phase. Books of poems by Megan Fernandez, Blas Falconer, Major Jackson, and Elizabeth Willis began to make the luggage heavy. Then I added two anthologies, and five fiction books the size of small dogs3. This inability to select less than 20 books will translate to a hefty, 54-pound luggage that I will need to unpack and rearrange tomorrow, to avoid a $150 fine for crossing the 50-pound luggage law. But I couldn’t have known it then, as I tucked every book into their little bed and smiled at the blinking babies.
Luggage, pre-clothing additions.
For part of the day, I also listened to Sierra Ferrell’s Long Time Coming. This album destroyed me earlier this month, when my fiancé and I were going through it. “West Virginia Waltz” in particular. Could barely listen to the song and yet, crawled to it – how it made me miss Petruț and fear that I had fucked it up for real this time. I push people away when I get scared and lately I’ve been terrified.
This is why I am packing.
We’ve been apart for five weeks. It’s been a surprising gift, the space, though tender and tough. Tomorrow he picks me up from Indianapolis at 7 p.m. The two of us live a semi-bipodal life between southern California and southern Indiana since we both work remote nonprofit jobs. Last summer we bounced around the San Francisco Bay Area, pet- and house-sitting for various friends and strangers. That was when this fog grew thick between us, fog that is only now beginning to dissipate. Fog we are now naming, touching, exploring, and trying to make sense of.
All day, I thought about the past five weeks at home while combing my room for lost socks and backs of earrings and hairballs from the cat and tax paperwork. No word is less poetic than a 1099 or W-2. I think again about friends whose presence and humor and perspective helped make this month a surprisingly good one, not good from a big-picture national or global standpoint, but relationally rich and full of meaning. At some point, I lay on the bed and fell asleep. Woke up with a new dream phrase, which I added to my scribbled dream notes, where I document phrases that emerged from the liminal state of waking.
Poet Brenda Hillman encourages people to write those “weird fragments” down, either when we have a saying or an image that comes to us from those strange terrains we waltz. From this month, I don’t have many bizarre visuals I recall, but I did write down three phrases:
“Ending the epistemology of time”
“Listen, a great mouse of the woods”
“But then when we see lovers on the hill”
I don’t know where to place them. They are odd-shaped marbles that don’t belong with the others–you know, the smooth, crystal ones with swirls down the middle.
For dinner, my mom and I ate at a restaurant called Taco Rosa, which I had never been to. In high school, Taco Rosa was where all the popular kids went; at least, that's how I remember it. But memory is a slippery fish. But I ate there tonight, with my mom, and we sipped chardonnay poured by someone with a heavy hand. “A holiday pour” as Tonya from White Lotus would say. Eating dinner at a restaurant with my mom made me feel very tender because it’s rare that we get one-on-one time. I’m one of four kids, who range in age from twenty-nine to thirty-eight. Tonight, it’s just me and my mom and the half-filled room at Taco Rosa. I would write more about it, but I don’t know how. I’m just glad we are close, my mom and me, and that we have things to talk about, and how she has a hearty laugh. I love a lot about my mom. I’m glad her radiation from earlier this year has finished. I’m glad we got to sit at Taco Rosa, and it doesn’t matter anymore, who was popular in high school. I'm glad I got to spend the last five weeks at home, combing through the cobwebs of time and sorting boxes in my room–things I kept for twenty years for no reason besides predisposed nostalgia. I gave away, threw out, and recycled many things during these last five weeks. Sometimes your time capsules need to be de-capsulated.
Tomorrow I will be on a plane, which is also a time capsule. A metal one with buttons and chairs and windows and people. A capsule with very random people, random people reading and watching random things, eating random snacks, clustered together above the planet, suspended in jelly for a few hours.
By evening, when the plane lands, I will wait for thirty minutes by the conveyor belt, looking for my little ships of luggage sailing around their plastic sea. I will walk out of the grey, sliding doors and scan the approaching cars on an Indiana evening, somewhere between winter and spring, where the sun has just set, and I will look for Petruț.
This idea comes from the documentary Endurance, in which a crew searches for a ship that is roughly two miles beneath the icy terrain of Antarctica. I fell asleep halfway through the movie and awoke to a photo of the old boat lodged in ice, thrust up and sideways, mid-swallow. That photo was from before the boat sank. It looks different now, in its permanent, watery home. The documentary debuted in 2023 and was directed by Jimmy Chin, Natalie Hewit, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
I would love to quote Elisa Gabbert’s “The Essay as Realm” (from the Fall 2024 issue of The Georgia Review). But copyright is tricky. If you like, do read her essay and consider randomness, please.
One of these books is Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo which weighs over two pounds, which is the same weight as a very small chihuahua. The comparison is fair, that’s all I’m saying. Now that I’ve brought Sally Rooney into this tiny time capsule, I must go on record to report that I am a fan of her writing. She gets a decent amount of shit for writing unlikable characters or relying too heavily on sex as a page-turning plot device. Whatever. I’m into it. I think she documents the interior world of her characters well too.
Allie Rigby is a poet with roots in the chaparral and deserts of Southern California. She is the author of Moonscape for a Child (Bored Wolves, 2024). Honors include a William Dickey Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, contribution to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is the curator behind Living Poetry. She has a master’s degree in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and currently lives with her partner and their various foster cats.