I brought three poems, a thermos and a plan to look relaxed, and only the thermos delivered.
ST. PETERSBURG, Florida – The folding chairs in the church hall have been arranged in a semicircle by someone who believes in intimacy, and the microphone has been tested by someone who believes in feedback.
Six o’clock: Setting up
Poetry night happens on the second floor of a hall that smells of floor polish, coffee urn and a sort of ancient lemon biscuit. I arrive early, because I am the person who is always early, and because Gerald the car had a brave day and I did not want to test him with a late arrival.
Priya, who runs the sign-up sheet with the ruthlessness of an air traffic controller, hands me a number. I am seventh. Seventh is a bad number: early enough to have no information, late enough to have time to panic.
The group chat, Notebook Wolves, offers support in the form of a muffin photograph and the sentence “Just don’t rhyme moon with June.” I have already rhymed moon with June. I rhymed it in the car. I am a proud and repeat offender.
Seven o’clock: The running order
For anyone planning their own open mic, here is how the first hour actually unfolds:
- A man named Desmond reads a poem about his lawnmower, and it is the most moving thing I have heard all week.
- Two sisters perform a duet about their grandmother’s recipe cards, and a woman in the second row starts quietly taking notes for the recipe.
- A teenager reads a poem about the humidity so accurate that the whole room fans itself in agreement.
- Someone’s phone rings in the middle of a line about silence. Nobody mentions it. Everybody mentions it afterward.
- I read, and I will get to that.
Half past seven: My three minutes
I read the short one. It goes:
The evening folds its heat into a chair, and I sit down inside it for a while.
It is two lines. I planned for it to take twenty seconds. It took four minutes, because Desmond asked a thoughtful question about the chair, and a thoughtful question at an open mic is a form of hostage-taking.
The chair, I explained, was the heat’s chair. Desmond nodded as though I had said something about taxes. Priya wrote something on her clipboard and I will never find out what.
Interval: A book fair on the horizon
During the break, over a cup of coffee strong enough to hold a spoon upright, somebody mentioned that the Miami Book Fair has announced its 2026 lineup of nearly 500 authors, and the whole hall went quiet in the way a hall goes quiet at the word “Atwood”.
I read the details on my phone under the table like a student with a note. It is the 43rd annual fair, held on the downtown Wolfson Campus of Miami Dade College, with programming in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. The announced names include Colson Whitehead, Margaret Atwood, and the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, along with National Book Award finalists Edwidge Danticat and Camonghne Felix. A local events site ran its own roundup of the fair lineup too, though I have not confirmed its date, so I am treating that as a friendly second opinion.
Priya says the fair is within a drive that Gerald could manage if we pack carefully and make no sudden decisions about the radio. I have started a list headed “What to bring”, and the list has only one item, which is “a notebook that is not this one”.
I should say what a fair like that means to someone who writes in a notebook with a coffee ring on every page. It means that for one week, in one city, a few thousand people will stand in queues for the purpose of buying paper with words on it. In a country that spends most of its time queuing for the opposite, I find this the most hopeful piece of news on my phone.
It also means I will have to decide what to wear to stand near a Poet Laureate. I am leaning towards the shirt with no stains, which narrows the choice to one.
Nine o’clock: The parking lot
Afterward in the parking lot, Desmond asks whether I am coming back next month. I say yes. He says that the lawnmower poem has a sequel, which concerns an edge trimmer and which he describes as “darker”. I tell him I would not miss it.
A woman with a clipboard of her own, from the group that runs the hall, tells everyone the next sign-up is open, and a collective groan rises that sounds exactly like hope. On the way to Gerald I read a headline on farm.FM that says “stone cold done with you” and decide it is the best opening line of any poem I have read this year, except that it belongs to a farm website and not to me.
That is the thing about a diary: you can steal an opening line and make a whole evening feel like yours.
Home: Deadline energy
Back at my desk I owe a column to Bohiney Magazine by morning, and the column is about open mics. It begins, “Nobody has ever left a church hall poetry night feeling worse than they arrived, except Desmond’s lawnmower.”
If you want to know how to tell a genuine headline from a headline that has been over-egged, the UK checklist for sorting real news from the other kind is the best five minutes I have spent online. And the notebook’s next page is waiting; you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat too.
The fan in my window is turning slowly. I rhyme moon with June one more time, quietly, for luck.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/