He gasps. “Low blow.”
I grin, trying to hide it behind a sip of coffee. “You’re right. They weren’t even your best sad-boy band.”
Fixing my eyes on the road, I attempt to use my best nonchalant voice. “So, if there’s an open mic, will you be reading something from your emotionally-repressed college journals?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then it’s not a real poetry night.”
We move into downtown, and as Noah starts hunting for a parking spot, I lean back in the seat, already bracing myself for questionable rhymes, overzealous finger snapping, and the possibility that this night might mean more than either of us planned.
I haven’t been to a poetry reading since college, and my heart is battling with my brain. I should be guilty, going to an event with another man. But lately, I’m tired of feeling guilty and sad.
The streetlights cast a warm glow in the truck’s cab. The windows are cracked and there’s no music, just the soft creak of old shocks and the occasional sigh of wind. I surprise myself by feeling a strange sense of calm. Like this isn’t a date-date. Like I’m not dressed for it, even though I definitely changed three times.
It’s just Noah.
My friend, my husband’s college roommate, our mailman, the man who pruned the butterfly garden.
And yet, tonight, he smells a little like sandalwood and something else—soap or cedar or whatever scent they bottle to make you think men who fix trucks also read Virginia Woolf.
We arrive at the poetry reading, and I pause just inside the doorway, drawn immediately to a large mixed-media piece, charcoal and fabric stitched across raw canvas, layered like it was trying to say something its creator couldn’t quite put into words.
“God, I love when a piece feels unresolved,” I murmur, half to myself, half to Noah. “Like it’s still becoming.”
He leans in, studying it with a furrowed brow. “Looks like a haunted quilt to me.”
I laugh, and we move farther in. The gallery glows under the warm, uneven light of mismatched lamps and string lights draped across the ceiling in lazy zigzags. Someone’s brought a tray of vegan brownies, and there’s a self-serve tea bar labeled Steep Your Feelings. The room hums with people trying very hard to seem unfazed by metaphor—lots of dramatic scarves, purposeful eye contact, and the occasional aggressive snapping.
Noah surveys the crowd with a kind of fascinated horror. “I forgot that we don’t clap. We snap. So this is where irony comes to die.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been a part of this world,” I whisper, nudging him with my elbow. “It felt weird and wrong to go without Owen.”
“Should I be worried?” he murmurs. “You look like you’re one poem away from resurrecting your ‘all pain is beauty’ college phase.”
I smirk. “Don’t tempt me. I still have a spiral notebook somewhere full of poems about the color gray.”
He shudders. “Did they rhyme?”
“Not even a little. It was all freeform despair. I wore a lot of turtlenecks.”
He lifts his coffee cup in a solemn toast. “To yourrecovery.”
I clink his cup. “To your survival.”
We settle into two creaky folding chairs in the third row. The vibe is somewhere between open mic night and religious ceremony. Everyone looks ready to Feel Something.
The first poet is introduced as “Blaze.”
Noah leans over and whispers, “That’s either a first name or a threat. Wasn’t that the name of a horse in a children’s book?”
I choke on my coffee. “Maybe. All I can think of is Blaze and the Monster Machines. Pretty sure that was a truck.”
“Pretty sure it’s a horse too.”
I turn my head, fully prepared to argue that Blaze is a monster machine, and he turns his head, presumably to argue his case. His eyebrow lifts. My lips twitch. It ends with my shoulders shaking in silent laughter while I pretend to sip my coffee.
Blaze begins a poem titled “Soul Drain: An Ode to Late-Stage Capitalism.” It is exactly as earnest and deeply felt as it sounds.
