We went to Seattle because Patti Smith was playing Portland, and Seattle was where Sage lived, and somewhere in that geography was an excuse for three poets to converge on a city we half knew, because a woman who had been telling the truth in verse for fifty years was singing in a room we could get tickets to, three hours down the highway.
Emma Williamson flew in from Canada. Sean Felix flew in too, from wherever Sean was living then. Sage Herrin was already there, already home, because Sage lived in Seattle, and there is something particular about landing in a city where one of your poets already has a life, a kettle, a favourite chair. It made the whole trip feel less like tourism and more like arriving somewhere we'd already been invited into. The four of us moved through that week the way people move when they've only ever known each other on the page. Careful at first. Then not careful at all.
I had published Emma and Sage back when Sunday Mornings at the River was still becoming a poetry press, back when it was barely anything, a name and a folder of submissions and a belief I hadn't tested yet. They were the first. The OG poets, we called them, half joking, the way you joke about things that are actually sacred. Sean too. We built something on faith, the four of us, before I had proof it would hold.
So we went to Pike Place and photographed the farmers market signs like tourists, which we were. We stood in a record store flipping through vinyl neither of us could afford. We sat in a gallery and I watched Sean walk the length of a room alone, small against the paintings, and I thought, this is what it looks like when a poet is working even when he isn't writing. We drank beer in a bar with our glasses raised at each other because we were happy, because we were together, because none of us quite believed the four of us were in the same city at the same time after years of knowing each other only through manuscripts and margin notes.
We read to each other in hotel rooms. Notebooks open on the bed, coffee going cold, someone's poem about love and someone else's poem about the same thing said differently, and I remember thinking that this was the whole point of the press, not the books themselves but this, four people who write because they have to, in a room together, saying the true thing out loud before it goes to print.
Then we got in a car and drove to Portland, because that was where Patti Smith actually was, three hours south down a highway none of us knew, taking turns choosing music, stopping wherever looked interesting enough to stop. It felt like the natural extension of everything else that week. You don't publish someone's first book and then not drive three hours with them to see the woman who taught you both what a true sentence sounds like.
And then the city started to disappear.
Not all at once. That's not how it happens. It happens in signs taped to doors. It happens in a chalkboard outside a shop that used to say something about drink specials and now says something about hours, shortened, uncertain. It happens in streets that empty out block by block until you notice, walking home, that the silence has a texture to it, that a city can go quiet the way a person goes quiet before they say something you don't want to hear.
Patti Smith's show was postponed. Then neither Seattle nor Portland was a city you could stay in, not safely, not without watching the walls close in around you one closed business at a time. We didn't get to see her. We got to see something else instead, the exact moment the world tipped, standing together in a hotel room deciding, in real time, who could get home and how.
I took the last flight out. Back to Europe, back to the care home I was living in at the time, back to a version of normal that wouldn't exist by the time I landed. I don't remember much about the flight except the quiet of it, how empty a plane can feel when everyone on it is running from the same invisible thing. I remember looking out the window at a city I'd only just started to love, watching it get smaller, knowing I wasn't coming back anytime soon, not for that reason, not for any reason.
We never saw Patti Smith. We saw each other instead, which I think now was always the more important thing, though I couldn't have told you that at the time. Emma and Sage and Sean, the first poets to trust me with their words, standing somewhere between two cities that were both quietly ending, one lockdown order at a time, still reading to each other because that was the only thing that made sense to do.
The press kept going. We all did. But I still think about that week the way you think about the last ordinary thing before everything changed, the four of us on a bridge at dusk, a whole skyline behind us, none of us knowing yet how long it would be before we stood in a room together again.