The Poetry Hotline I Ran From My Kitchen
Call after ten, and I'd read you one poem for the price of the call.
The flyer said POETRY HOTLINE in letters I had cut out of a cereal box, and by the third night I was taking calls from strangers in my pyjamas next to a pot of cold dal.
Let me back up.
When my grandmother died, I inherited three things: her flat, her pressure cooker, and a red rotary phone that weighed as much as a healthy toddler. The landline still worked because nobody at the phone company had the heart to come and disconnect it. For months it sat on the kitchen counter, silent, gleaming, judging my takeaway habit.
Then one insomniac Tuesday, somewhere around 1 a.m., I found a book of writing prompts wedged behind her recipe tin. One of them said: give your words to a stranger without expecting anything back. I looked at the prompt. I looked at the phone. I owned a glue stick and had recently finished a box of cereal.
The flyer went up on the noticeboard by the lift, between an ad for guitar lessons and a photo of a cat named Biscuit who had been missing since March. It said: POETRY HOTLINE. CALL AFTER TEN. ONE POEM PER CALLER. FREE. Then my grandmother's number, which felt right, because she was the only person I knew who believed poems were a public utility, like water.
I assumed nobody would call... I was making tea when the phone rang so loudly I threw the spoon across the kitchen.
“Is this the poem thing?” A man's voice, gruff, maybe sixty.
“Yes. Yes! This is the poem thing.”
“Go on then.”
I read him a short Neruda in translation, my voice shaking like I was defusing a bomb. When I finished there was a long pause... some throat-clearing, and then: “Read the middle bit again.” I did. He said “hm” in the way men of a certain age say hm when something has gotten past their defences, thanked me, and hung up.
I stood in my kitchen at 10:40 p.m., holding a receiver connected to the wall by an actual cord, feeling like I had just invented fire.
Word got around the building, then the street, then wherever words go after that. The calls were never many, two or three a night, but they were never nothing. Drunk students called on a dare and went quiet halfway through. A night-shift nurse called from the hospital car park at the end of her shift, always asking for “something with a bit of morning in it.”
A teenager called to ask if I had anything about liking someone who does not know you exist, and I read him something about love so old the poet had been dead four hundred years, and he said, stunned, “So this has happened before?”
“Constantly,” I told him. “Since the invention of people.”
There were rules. One poem per caller, no exceptions, because scarcity is romance. No requests for stock tips, which happened once. And I never asked anyone's name, because the whole point of a hotline is that you can be nobody, and nobody is sometimes the only person brave enough to feel things.
Then, in November, the silent caller started.
Every Wednesday, 11:14 p.m., almost to the minute. The phone would ring, I would answer, and there would be nothing. Not heavy breathing, nothing creepy. Just the soft, carpeted quiet of a person sitting in a room, holding a phone, saying no words at all.
The first time, I hung up... The second time, I said hello four ways and then, out of some instinct I still cannot explain, I just read the poem anyway. A short one about winter light. When I finished, the line stayed open for two seconds, like a held breath, and then clicked off, gentle as someone closing a door behind a sleeping child.
So that became ours.
Every Wednesday I chose something in advance, the way you cook differently when you know exactly who is coming to dinner. I found myself picking poems about loneliness that were not sad, if that makes sense. Poems where the empty chair is still pulled up to the table.
My friends thought the whole thing was hilarious, then concerning, then hilarious again. “You run a hotline,” Meera said, “from the kitchen. Like a scam, but the product is feelings.” She was not wrong. But she also started sending me poems to read on it, so.
Nobody ever called a poetry hotline because they needed a poem. They called because a phone that gets answered at midnight is proof the world is still staffed.
In February, the Wednesday calls stopped.
I told myself it meant nothing... People move. People get better. People find Biscuit the cat and no longer require literature.
But I kept choosing a Wednesday poem anyway, and I kept sitting near the phone at 11:14, and the not-ringing was the loudest sound in that kitchen, louder than the pressure cooker, and my grandmother's pressure cooker could summon the dead.
Three weeks later there was an envelope in my postbox with no stamp, which meant someone in the building. Inside, in handwriting that leaned like it was walking into wind, a note:
“My husband had a stroke in the spring. He lost his speaking but not his hearing. Wednesdays were his. He passed on the 4th. He would want you to know he heard every one. The winter light one was his favourite. He was a plumber. He would also want you to know your building's pipes are overdue.”
I sat on the kitchen floor and cried over a plumber I had never met, whose voice I had never heard, who had listened to me read forty poems down a copper wire.
I read that Wednesday's poem to the dial tone.
It felt less crazy than not reading it.
The hotline still runs, most nights, though the flyer has been rained on and rewritten twice, and Biscuit's photo has been replaced by a newer, more optimistic cat. The nurse still calls for her bit of morning. Last month I started writing my own poems for the callers instead of borrowing other people's, which terrified me more than reading to strangers ever did, and eventually I posted a few on a community wall for poets, where a woman I will never meet commented that the winter light one made her call her father.
Good, I thought. Call him. Call everyone. The lines are open.
People ask me why I do it, usually with the tone you would use to ask someone why they collect antique scissors. I tell them it costs me one poem a night and it makes the city feel less like a filing cabinet of separate lives. What I do not tell them is the other reason, the one that sounds too soft out loud.
Somewhere out there is a person sitting by a phone, saying nothing... needing everything.
And on the counter, next to the dal, a red telephone heavy as a toddler waits to be answered, still listed under my grandmother's name.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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