My Hands Shook Through the Whole Poem
The audience saw the paper tremble; only I knew my knees matched.
The microphone smelled like someone else's breath mints. That is what I remember first about the night I read my poem out loud for the first time: not the lights, not the faces, but that sharp borrowed mint smell as I leaned in and heard my own breathing come back at me through the speakers.
The second thing I remember is the paper. One sheet, printed at the library that afternoon because my home printer had died out of pure spite.
In my hand, the page shivered like something newly hatched... I had not given it permission to do that.
There were maybe forty people in the bookshop cafe, folded into mismatched chairs under fairy lights, next to a chalkboard that said OPEN MIC. BE KIND. Forty people is nothing. I have argued with more relatives than that at a single wedding. But forty strangers watching you hold the most honest thing you have ever written is a different kind of arithmetic.
The poem was about my mother's hands. She had been gone three years by then, and for two of those years I had written around the grief the way you walk around a hole in the floor. Then one night a strange little line on a prompts page, write about a tool someone loved, cracked me open sideways, and I wrote about her hands instead.
The burn scar from the oven door in 1998. The way she peeled an orange in one long unbroken ribbon and handed it to you like a medal. The blue biro she kept behind her ear like a carpenter keeps a pencil.
I wrote it in forty minutes... and then avoided it for four months.
My friend Dena signed me up for the open mic without asking. She texted me a screenshot of the lineup with my name in slot seven and one instruction: wear the green shirt, you look trustworthy in green. I wore the green shirt. I did not feel trustworthy. I felt like a witness at my own trial.
Slot seven meant sitting through six other readers while my heart performed a drum solo nobody had requested. A man read a very long poem about motorways. A woman read something about her divorce that made the whole room go quiet in the good way, the way a church goes quiet. I kept rehearsing my first line under my breath until the words stopped meaning anything, the way any word does if you say it too many times. Hands. Hands... Hands.
Then the host said my name, and my body stood up before I had agreed to anything.
Here is what nobody tells you about stage fright: it is not in your mind.
It lives in the knees, which I could feel knocking, actually knocking, a thing I had believed was invented by cartoonists. It lives in the mouth, which turns to blotting paper the moment you need it. And it lives in the hands, which took my one printed page and turned it into a small white flag, trembling at the exact level of my heart, surrendering to everyone.
I read the whole poem like that. Shaking. At one point the paper rattled against the mic stand and the sound went out through the speakers, tiny and amplified, like rain starting on a tin roof. A woman in the front row looked at my hands and then, kindly, made herself look only at my face for the rest of the poem. I saw her decide to do it. I have never forgotten that small mercy.
I did not die. I want that on the record.
Line by line, my mother's hands came out of my mouth, the scar and the orange peel and the blue biro, and my own hands shook the entire time, as if they were trying to remember how to be hers.
When I finished there was a beat of silence that lasted approximately nine years... and then applause. Warm, loud, real. You can tell the real kind from the polite kind the way you can tell a laugh from a cough.
I floated back to my seat on legs made of wet rope. Dena squeezed my arm hard enough to leave a mark. I decided I would never, ever do that again, and also that I could not wait to do it again. Both facts felt completely true.
Then the host came back to the mic and ruined my life a second time.
"Our slot eight had to head home," he said, scanning the room over his glasses. "Anyone brave enough to give us one more?" And Dena, whom I have since forgiven but never fully trusted near raffles or sign-up sheets, lifted my arm into the air like a referee declaring a winner.
I had nothing else with me. One poem. One page. So I walked back up and read the same poem twice in one night, to the same forty people, twelve minutes apart.
And here is the part I did not see coming: the second reading was worse.
Not a disaster. Worse in a quieter, stranger way. Because the second time, my hands were still. My voice was even. My knees behaved like professional knees. I hit every line cleanly, like stepping stones I had already crossed once, and the poem just stood there in the middle of the room, reciting its sentences, shaking hands with no one. The applause afterward was polite. I knew the difference now. Twelve minutes earlier, I had heard the other kind.
The first time, my hands shook and the poem lived. The second time, my hands were still and the poem just stood there, saying its lines.
I chewed on that for weeks. I had spent my whole life believing that fear was the enemy of the thing, the static over the signal. Every piece of advice I had ever collected about performing was really advice about becoming smooth: slow down, breathe from the belly, imagine the crowd in their socks. All of it aimed at making the trembling stop.
But the trembling was not interference.
The trembling was the signal.
It was my body registering, accurately, that something true was leaving it and could not be recalled. The stillness of the second reading was not courage. It was just the absence of stakes. I had already paid. The poem had already cost me everything it was going to cost that night, and a poem that costs nothing sounds like it.
Months later I entered that poem in a monthly poetry contest, and I noticed my hand hovering over the trackpad doing its old familiar shiver before I clicked submit. I sat back and laughed alone in my kitchen. Good, I thought. There it is. Proof of life.
It did not win, in case you are wondering. It placed nowhere at all. I have read it aloud eleven more times since then, at bookshops and one very echoey community hall, and my hands have shaken at every single one... and I have stopped asking them not to.
Now I have a small ritual. Before any reading, I make tea I do not intend to drink and hold the cup with both hands, and I watch the surface of it tremble in tiny rings, like rain starting on a tin roof, and I say quietly, to my hands, to my mother, to whatever is listening: there you are.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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