The Night the Power Failed at the Poetry Slam
No mic, no lights: we finished by phone torch, and it was better.
The transformer blew during a haiku, which felt rude to everyone involved.
Third Thursday slam, basement of the Anchor and Crane, a room that holds sixty people and their coats if the coats are thin. Sticky floor, a microphone held together with gaffer tape and prayer, five judges recruited from the audience with whiteboards and dry erase markers, scores out of ten, Olympic style, boo the low ones. Outside, a storm had been auditioning all evening, the kind where the rain comes in sideways like it has somewhere to be.
Our host was Marcus, a man with a clipboard and the crowd control instincts of a primary school teacher, which is the highest compliment I can pay a slam host. The sacrificial poet had already gone up to calibrate the judges. Round one was underway. A woman named Dee was on the list for the first time ever, and you could find her in the crowd by looking for the person holding a folded piece of paper the way you hold a boarding pass in a country where you do not speak the language.
I was on the list too, with a poem I had rehearsed so many times it had stopped meaning anything to me, the way a word goes strange if you say it forty times. I had beaten everyone in that basement at least once except Tobi, who performed with his eyes closed and one fist against his chest and had taken the title off me three slams running. I wanted it back. I am not proud of how much.
A man named Colm was mid-haiku, on the second line, when the world went bang.
Not click. Bang.
A transformer up the street let go with a sound like a struck bin lid, the lights died, the mic died, the beer fridge behind the bar sighed once and gave up, and sixty people sat in a black basement under a pub while upstairs the whole bar cheered ironically, the way crowds do when a plate smashes.
Somebody screamed... then immediately laughed at herself. The emergency exit sign glowed green over the stairs like a tiny bored moon.
Marcus did the responsible thing. He announced, clipboard invisible, voice doing its best, that we would reschedule, that everyone's entry fee would carry over, that health and safety and so on. And from somewhere in the dark, a voice I never identified said the eight words that saved the night:
'Why? We can hear you fine, Marcus.'
A pause... Sixty people thinking the same thought at the same time, you could practically hear it.
Then the phone torches came up, one by one... all over the basement, like the room was slowly remembering the stars. The barman came down with a crate of votive candles left over from some Valentine's promotion and set them along the bar and the front of the stage, and the whole place went gold at the edges. Marcus looked around, said 'Right,' put the dead microphone gently on the floor like a fallen comrade, and dragged a wooden chair into the middle of the room.
'New rules,' he said, standing on it. 'No mic, so project. No spotlights, so nobody can see you shaking. And the whiteboards are useless in the dark, so as of now, no scores. Everyone advances.'
'Tonight there are no judges. There are only poems.'
You would think competitive poets would riot at that. Instead there was a sound I had never heard that room make... relief. Actual audible relief, sixty people exhaling their rankings.
What happened over the next ninety minutes I have been failing to describe ever since, but here is my best attempt. Without the mic, poets had to stand on the chair in the middle of us, in a ring of candle and phone light, and simply be a voice. The hecklers went quiet, not from politeness but from physics: heckling needs a distance that the dark had abolished. People leaned in the way you lean toward a fire. Between poems you could hear the storm working the street doors, and during them you could hear everything else: every breath a poet took, every place a line turned, the tiny paper sound of Dee unfolding her boarding pass.
Because Dee did go up.
She had been one step from the stairs when the lights died, I found out later, and had taken the blackout as a sign from a merciful universe. It was the no scores announcement that turned her around. She stood on the chair, invisible except for her hands in someone's torch beam, and read a poem about working night shifts on a hospital ward, about being the only person awake in a building full of held breath, about how the dark of a ward at 4 a.m. is not empty, it is full, and in the dark of that basement every line landed twice. When she finished, nobody scored her. People just snapped their fingers all over the room, and in the blackness it sounded exactly like the rain outside had come indoors to join in.
The light was never the point. The point was the dark, and a room full of strangers deciding not to be alone in it.
When my turn came, I stood on the chair and could not do it.
The over-rehearsed poem, I mean, the tournament weapon, the one engineered to beat Tobi. It needed the spotlight and the scores to make sense, and both were gone. So I did an older one instead, half from memory, a poem about the year I moved to this city knowing nobody, about how a new beginning is mostly just a loneliness you have decided to be hopeful about. I lost my way in the third stanza and stood there in the dark for five full seconds... and someone's voice, I think it was Tobi's, said quietly, 'Take your time, brother.' I would trade every score I ever got in that basement for those four words.
The power came back at five to eleven, during the last poem of the night. Every light in the basement blazed on at once, the beer fridge lurched back to life, and the entire room groaned like a bear woken in January. The barman, a man of impeccable instincts, reached over and turned the lights straight back off. We finished by candle, as was now clearly the law.
The morning after, Dee posted her night shift poem on a community wall for poets, where strangers said to her in writing what our dark room had said in finger snaps. She performs constantly now and I take full credit, by which I mean none of it. I finally sent my own blackout poem, the new beginnings one with the hole in the third stanza patched, to a monthly poetry contest, because it had done the only audition that matters: it had survived being spoken to faces I could not see.
The Anchor and Crane slam still runs, third Thursdays. Once a month now, by unanimous vote, Marcus stands on the chair, announces the lights out round, and the barman flips the switch on purpose.
There is a candle stub on my desk, white, burned down to a knuckle. I took it from the front of the stage that night, and I have never lit it since. Some lights you keep unlit so they stay the light from that particular dark.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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