The Open Mic Where I Read About Her
She was in the audience; the poem didn't know when to stop.
The rule at The Cellar was one poem, five minutes, and a single candle burning on a stool beside the mic. I broke the rule about the poem, which is to say I read one that refused to end, and she was sitting six feet away in a yellow raincoat while it happened.
The Cellar was exactly what it sounds like: a basement under a tea shop that held maybe forty people if half of them liked each other. Third Thursday of every month. The mic crackled if you got too close, the ceiling pipes sweated in summer, and the host, a retired schoolteacher named Farid, lit the candle at eight and blew it out when the last poet finished. That candle was the whole religion of the place. While it burned, you listened.
I found it during the loneliest year of my life, which I did not know was the loneliest year of my life until it ended. I had moved cities for a job that existed mostly in spreadsheets, and I was writing again for the first time since school, badly, in the notes app, on buses. I had even taken a short online course about writing poetry, mostly so that one hour a week, someone's voice in my headphones would say the word "stanza" to me like it mattered. For six months I came to The Cellar and never read. I sat in the back and held my tea and let other people be brave at me.
Aisha read on my second Thursday. She was terrible at the mic in the best way, stood too close, made it crackle, laughed at herself, started over. Her poem was about her grandmother's sewing machine and it flattened the room. Afterward, by the stairs, I told her the line about the bobbin had wrecked me, and she looked at me with genuine delight and said, "Which one are you? You never read."
"I'm working up to it," I said.
"Work faster," she said. "The candle's only so tall."
We became the kind of friends the third Thursday makes. Chai after, at the counter upstairs, arguing about whether rhyme is a cage or a spine.
She rescued spiders. I watched her do it twice, once in the tea shop, once at a bus stop, this unhurried ceremony where she cupped the thing in her bare hands and carried it somewhere better, like a small evacuation, while everyone else stood on chairs. She never mentioned it either time. That detail went straight into the notebook, and that is when I should have known I was in trouble, because I had started collecting her.
The poem about her took four months and did not want to be finished. Every draft grew a new stanza. The safe version, the one I told myself I might read someday, was three stanzas of plausible deniability: a poem about loneliness ending, about a city becoming a place. The unsafe version had two more stanzas. The fourth had the spiders in it. The fifth had the third Thursday in it, and the yellow raincoat, and there was no person in that basement who could have heard it and not turned to look at her.
I decided, the way you decide these things, meaning barely, that on the November Thursday I would finally read. The safe version. Three stanzas. In and out, polite applause, membership in the brave half of the room at last. I put my name on Farid's clipboard at 7:55 with a steady hand.
She wasn't supposed to be there. She had a cousin's engagement that weekend, she'd told me, in another city, and I will be honest with you, her absence was a load-bearing part of my courage.
At 8:20 the stairwell door opened and the yellow raincoat came down the steps, dripping, and she slid into the front row and mouthed, cancelled, and grinned at me, and somewhere behind my ribs a structural engineer quietly resigned.
Farid called my name at 8:40.
The candle was at half height. The mic crackled when I breathed. I could see her in the front row with her chin in her hand. I said the title, which gave away nothing, and I began.
Stanza one, fine. Stanza two, fine. Stanza three arrived, the agreed ending, the last line I had rehearsed against the bathroom tiles that morning, and I heard my own voice land on it... and then, instead of stopping, keep going.
I want to be clear about what happened, because I have had two years to think about it.
I did not decide.
There was no moment of nerve. The poem had been memorized whole, all five stanzas, because that is how I memorize, and my mouth simply continued into the fourth stanza the way a river continues past a town. I heard the spiders leave my teeth. I heard the small evacuations. Somewhere in the dark a chair creaked. I did not look at the front row. The fifth stanza had the raincoat in it and I read it to the candle, only to the candle, and then it was over... and the room did that thing where silence goes on one beat too long before the snapping starts.
You can hide inside a poem for months. Read it out loud once and every hiding place burns down.
I don't remember walking back to my seat. I remember an old man in a brown cardigan gripping my forearm with startling strength as I passed. His eyes were wet. "That was my wife," he said. "Forty years. She did that with the spiders. Word for word, she did that. How did you know?"
I didn't say, I don't know your wife, sir, I was describing a girl in this room. I said, "I'm so glad it found you," which turned out to be the truest sentence of my night, because here is what nobody tells you before your first open mic: the poem stops being yours the moment it clears the microphone. You write it about one person. The dark hands it to forty. The old man got a wife back for three minutes. What she got... I still couldn't tell you, because when I finally looked at the front row, Aisha was looking at the candle, not at me, with an expression I have never successfully read in two years of trying.
By the stairs afterward she hugged me, quick and ordinary. "You finally read," she said. "That was brave. Whoever she is, you should tell her." And she went up into the rain.
Whoever she is. I stood under the tea shop awning for a long time, doing the math on that sentence... and the math would not resolve. Either the disguise had worked far better than I had any right to expect, or it hadn't worked at all and she was handing me a door and watching whether I'd notice it. I did not sleep. I wrote, because that is what I do instead of sleeping, and everything I wrote was about love, undisguised, no raincoat for the raincoat.
December's third Thursday, she signed the clipboard first.
She stood too close to the mic, the way she always did. Her poem was new. It was about a girl who ferries spiders out of buildings, and it went along quietly enough until the fourth stanza, where a boy appeared, a boy who watched her carry them and thought she didn't notice him watching, a boy who put it all in a poem and read it to a candle in a basement believing that a yellow raincoat couldn't hear.
She looked directly at me on that line.
The whole room turned to see where the look landed.
When she finished, she did something no one had ever done at The Cellar. She leaned over and blew out the candle, out of turn, eight poets still on the clipboard, and in the two seconds of pure dark before Farid found the matches, laughing, scandalized, a hand found mine in the blackness and held on.
The candle came back. We did not let go. We have not, generally speaking, let go since.
Farid made us relight it ourselves, as a penalty. It takes two people longer than you would think, when neither one will surrender the match.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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