Straight No Chaser

Bliss

it was your typical, hip, cigarette-smoky coffeehouse. u-shaped building so you couldn't see the open mic room from the entrance, really eclectic people--women in baggy jeans, men in hiphuggers. mel and i were two of maybe ten heteros in the place, and definitely the only black women with straightened hair, and we felt the eyes. we did. but it was okay. we were all over each other all night, she and i, because this is our last week as roommates, and we'll miss each other. it's nice to have someone to do such things with, someone who doesn't embarrass you by complaining the entire time about the general weirdness of the atmosphere.

amateurs went first, some good, some bad. nothing trite. no "oh how i love my boyfriend" poetry. true to form, younger poets delivered pieces on self-mutilation and being hurt in love; older ones stuck to nature themes, narrated quiet forest walks and drew giant flowery metaphors, some of which worked. some. everybody was angry about something, especially the albanian woman who spat out this diatribe, rapid-fire, about the president and how badly he's fucking up not just the country but the world, and then later, on misconceptions of modern christianity. she was good. she was last, before our headliner.

(melony was like, "your knee is vibrating." yes, yes it was. my little anxiety thing, a nervous tic that flared up as i was thinking, please let her be fantastic, i'll have no reason to keep living if this set doesn't change the world. and also, please let them like her. to melony: "it's just the coffee." not everyone understands this kind of love.)

i've read her book. i've heard her speak. i have a decent grasp on some, not all, of her poems. just decent, nothing i could write a thesis about. to really appreciate the poems, reading them on paper, you have to kind of understand, and insinuate, this kind of graceful vulnerability she exudes in person, even when she's at the head of the class. or the front of a room where she's standing with her own book in hand, and an audience waiting, rapt, to hear her. you see her in black, perched on the edge of a stool, with the soles of her leather boots compulsively tapping the floor, and you want to protect her. but all you can do is listen.

it is almost surreal, to hear the piece in the artist's own voice. she has one poem, appears in the book, kind of a signature piece that, before, just kind of seemed like the requisite "musings on daddy issues" poem. daddy was my childhood villain, and so forth. but she prefaced the reading with some background information--daddy was an alcoholic, and an abusive one at that, akin to the boogeyman figure most of us remember--and then the reading was, it was. it was. and it was raining out, a monsoon, and she chose the sequence of poems to reflect that, each one somber and contemplative, punctuated by the tattoo on the tented roof overhead. it rained harder and harder, the further in she got. awesome. rain seeped in along the sides, got in the seams at the edges of the tent, and sort of puddled around her feet.

she was weeping in words.

they came from the book, mostly. a couple did not. there was one i was sure i had not read before, one inspired by a conversation she'd had with her mother (who has seven children in total, of which strange is the fourth--like melinda!), about a child crying in her mother's womb. about the mother hearing it. centered on the same themes of the household tension her father caused, suggesting that maybe the crying inchoate was reacting to the sadness around her. strange's older sister. i started crying and the gay couple behind me rubbed my shoulders.

because, you know. it was perfect. i could not have asked for a more perfect thing for her to have written about.

and then she came and talked to us, afterward, and i apologized (because oh, i forgot to mention, the host pointed me out to the audience--"this is a student of our featured headliner's, do you want to come up here and give this introduction yourself? is she a good professor?"--and instead of the effusive "oh god yes, she's a tremendous inspiration and the saving grace of my life, right now," all i said was "uh, yeah, she's great," because that's the kind of inarticulate twerp that i am), and she said she was immensely glad we came, because she's never had a student attend one of her readings before. which, swoon. i made up for the lack of effusiveness (effusivity?) then, i was effusive, and melony was anonymously effusive, and then she put off her peacoat and ran off into the rain.

and today she signed my book: "to shannon--with gratitude...and admiration (& celebration) of your tremendous gifts as thinker and creator!"

and i died happy, and you may thank my eternal spirit for this and all entries hereafter.

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