This paper will discuss the work of Etel Adnan by reading how her poetry relates to the Mediterranean Sea and her use of punctuality in her prose work. Reading the poetics of Adnan’s Of Cities & Women: Letters to Fawwaz, To be in a Time of War, and select interviews with the author, this paper aims to engage the ways the sea portrays themes such as the relationship between colony/colonizer, migrant and state, and linguistic impositions. Her narrative attempts to create unity, both geographically and historically, as she rewrites the landscape around her by integrating history through her meditations on wandering. Often her articulations of place are consistently punctuated. For example, To Be in a Time of War is broken into small fragments that together leave the reader sensing the fragmentation of time and space as the Iraq War unfolds as it operates simultaneously through punctuated time and formally as a work of prose that reinforces the power of a full stop deployed within her text. Between every full stop comes an oscillation between daily living and the war in Iraq. Her periods stop the flow of reading enough to see her working back and forth through chores and war. She expresses her sensation of placelessness and later in her work notes the subtle differences and othering at work within the metropole; despite having settled. Her long work on Iraq fully punctuates the oscillations evident in daily leaving between worlds, spaces and times as it seems one who may never truly settle despite the number of years spent away. Often writing in-between, Adnan’s work uses both her relation to the sea and the period as a placeholder, which becomes formally interesting for the reader stylistically as she consistently conveys a pause—between—through her prose and punctuation.