Three Minutes of Terror at My First Open Mic
My paper shook audibly; the microphone broadcast my heartbeat to strangers.
The sign-up sheet had a coffee ring on it, and I wrote my name inside the circle like a target. Slot seven. Three minutes. A Tuesday night in February at a bar called The Hollow, where the stage was just the corner where somebody had shoved the pool table out of the way.
I want to be honest about why I was there, because it was not bravery. It was my sister. She had gone through my desk looking for a phone charger, found my notebook instead, and read fourteen poems without permission. Then she called me and said, “These are good, you coward.” That is the most loving sentence anyone in my family has ever produced, and it came with a deadline: she had already looked up the open mic and texted me the address.
The Hollow smelled like spilled lager and radiator dust. Every table had a candle stuffed into a jam jar, and the overhead lights were off, so the whole room flickered like it was thinking about something. The host was a big man named Marcus who held his clipboard the way a priest holds a missal. He told me the rules twice. Three minutes. No music unless you brought your own instrument. “And don’t apologize before you read,” he said. “Everybody apologizes. It wastes your time and it doesn’t work.”
I had two poems in my jacket. The first was a funny one about parallel parking, tested on coworkers, guaranteed to get at least two laughs. The second was about my mother’s hands after her stroke, about the eight weeks she spent relearning her own signature at the kitchen table, tracing her name over and over like she was forging herself. That one had been folded and unfolded so many times the creases had gone soft as cloth. I had no intention of reading it. I want that on the record.
I sat through six readers. A girl performed a breakup poem directly at a specific man near the door, which was uncomfortable and magnificent. An old man played the harmonica for ninety seconds and then said, “That was the poem,” and sat down to real applause. Somebody read off a phone with the brightness too low and kept losing their place in their own life.
Then Marcus looked at the clipboard and said, “Slot seven. Give it up.”
Here is what nobody tells you about walking to a microphone: the light finds you before you find the mic. I went blind for a second. The room disappeared and all I could see was the row of jam jar candles stretching away from me like a runway that led nowhere.
The mic stand was set for someone a foot taller, and I wrestled it down with a screech that got the first laugh of my set, which would have been great if I had said anything yet.
I took out the parking poem.
The paper was shaking. Not trembling... shaking, an audible papery rattle, and the microphone, which was more sensitive than any confession booth, picked it up and played it to the whole bar. I pressed the page against my chest to stop it, and then the mic found my heartbeat instead. I stood in front of forty strangers while a speaker system announced exactly how scared I was, in rhythm.
Someone near the front whispered, “You’ve got it,” the way you talk to a horse.
I opened my mouth to say “This one’s called Ode to Parallel Parking.”
What I heard myself say was, “This is called Her Hands, Relearning.”
I have thought about that moment for years and I still cannot tell you who made the decision. It was not me... or it was a version of me that only exists at 9:43 pm in dark rooms. My hand had already gone into the other pocket. The soft-creased page was already open. There was nothing to do but read it.
So I read it. My voice cracked on the line about her signature, the wobbling capital J that used to be the strongest letter she wrote. Somewhere in the second stanza I stopped hearing my own heartbeat through the speakers.
Somewhere after that, the paper went quiet.
Fear did not leave when I stood up. It just changed its address: stomach, then hands, then the paper itself, until the whole room could hear it, and the strange thing is that nobody minded.
When I finished there was a silence I could not read... Two full seconds. In stage time that is a decade.
Then a woman by the radiator said, “Read it again.”
Not louder, please. Not one more. Read it again. Marcus checked his watch, shrugged, and said, “You’ve got a minute forty left. Go on.”
Reading a poem the second time to the same room is a completely different act. The first time you are asking permission. The second time you are keeping a promise. I read it slower. I looked up twice. The shaking never came back.
Afterward the woman found me at the bar. She was still in scrubs under her coat, night shift at St. Agnes, and she told me her mother was four weeks into the same relearning, same kitchen table, different city.
“She practices on the backs of envelopes,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone else had watched that.” We did not exchange names. Some conversations are better as strangers.
I sat in my car for a while before driving home. I texted my sister: did it. read the real one. She replied with nothing but her own name, typed in wobbly letters, which meant she was crying and did not want to say so.
The poem did not stay in my pocket after that. I typed it up and entered it in a monthly poetry contest, where it did not win anything, and I have never cared less about not winning. I put it up on a community wall for poets, where a stranger commented that she had printed it for her father, and another asked if she could read it at a rehab clinic in Pune. I started writing toward family on purpose instead of by accident, which turned out to be where most of my real material had been hiding the whole time, filed under things I was not going to talk about.
People ask if the fear goes away with practice. It does not... exactly. It gets smaller and better behaved, like a dog that has finally been walked enough. But it still knows your address.
Every February I go back to The Hollow and put my name in slot seven if it is open. The pool table is still shoved in the corner. Marcus still tells everyone not to apologize. And the paper, the original, soft as an old map, lives flat in my desk drawer now, retired.
It does not shake anymore.
Some nights, I will be honest... I miss the sound.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.