by Rose, Katia
Ripping my notebook out of my bag, I flip to a blank page and start again.
I wasn’t old enough for a real glass
So they gave me a plastic cup.
My pen only pauses for a second before the words keep flowing.
Twenty-Two
Dylan
FREE VERSE: Poetry that is not limited to a distinct meter or rhyme scheme and which often follows the natural patterns of speech
“She isn’t here, man.”
Zach answers my question before I can even ask it, and I’m glad he doesn’t make me say it out loud. She hasn’t replied to my text, although considering it’s been three weeks since she walked away from me at McGill and I only felt ready to send the message yesterday, that’s not saying much.
I knew she might not show. I knew I might not get another shot.
That doesn’t make it any easier to accept.
“But pretty much everyone else you know is,” Zach continues. “I saw your brother. I knew it was him from the shoulders. How do you beefcakes even fit through doors?”
“Sideways,” I joke.
Stella and Owen come over to interrupt us where we’re talking by the sound system. The microphone is, as always, being uncooperative, and Zach and I have been messing with wires for almost half an hour. The slam was supposed to start fifteen minutes ago.
“Any luck?” Owen asks.
“This is the last possible thing for us to try,” I answer. “Zach, go test it.”
He bounds away into the crowd milling around Taverne Toulouse and disappears from view for a moment before popping up on stage. I see his mouth move behind the microphone, but no sound comes out.
“Fucking hell,” I grumble. “I swear, if this doesn’t work...”
I signal for Zach to keep talking as I grab one of the cords and plug it into a different outlet. Zach’s voice immediately booms out into the room.
“I like big butts and I cannot lie!”
“Oh my god.” Stella actually snorts as the whole room bursts out laughing. “Out of everything he could have picked to sing...”
“I’ve long stopped questioning why Zach does some of the things he does.”
“Well now that I don’t have to shout over the crowd,” Owen announces, “time to get this slam started!”
He strides over to the stage, and the crowd settles into the rows of folding chairs we have set up once he makes it clear things are getting underway. A few people are even left standing against the walls or claiming stools at the bar. It’s a massive turn out for a slam, and I feel a rush of pride at seeing tonight end up such a success.
“This is in fact our third slam of the season,” Owen is in the middle of announcing. He’s already got the crowd so amped up from his introduction that he has to shout into the mic to make himself heard. “This is, however, our first time back here at Taverne Toulouse since the reopening. Consider yourselves lucky. We held last month’s slam in my mother’s basement. She wore a bathrobe and sat in her armchair the whole time filing her bunions off.”
They actually had it at a library, but the crowd indulges Owen with a laugh.
“This is a big improvement. Let’s give it up for the folks at Taverne Toulouse who made it possible for us to be here tonight!”
After leading a round of applause, Owen gets down to explaining the rules of the slam. Judges have been randomly selected from the audience and will score each poem out of ten. The poet’s have three minutes to perform and receive time penalties to their scores if they go too long. The highest ranking poets from round one will move onto the second round to determine the winner.
I’ve heard it all a thousand times. I’ve said it all myself as a host more times than I can count, but I still feel that rush of static energy crackle through me like it’s my first slam.
There’s something special about the way the room seems to vibrate during a poetry slam, radiating anticipation. People come to a slam hungry. They come here to be fed. They open themselves up to words and feelings and ideas that would be too much to swallow on a regular day.
Only this isn’t a regular day. This is a moment when everyone in the room commits themselves to leaving regular behind, to dropping the masks and pretences and leaving themselves bare, ready to give and receive. Something magical happens when people do that. There’s no other word for it; it’s pure magic to feel that transformation, to witness it, to be part of it.
That’s what being at a slam feels like. It feels like being part of something.
There are a lot of new faces this season, but quite a few veterans take the stage during the first round as well. Everyone brings their A game, and I have no idea who’s going to come out on top. The poems spoken tonight range from humorous to heartbreaking, from things as mundane as flirting with cashiers at Starbucks to life altering events like watching a parent battle cancer.
Each poet brings a different energy on stage, takes hold of the crowd in their own unique way, letting their words come to life in a way that’s so different from reading poetry on a page. These are stories that rely on breath and sound instead of letters and spaces. They exist in this moment and this moment alone. They’ll never be spoken or heard in the exact same way again.
It’s enough to take my mind off my own life. For the whole first round, I forget about what will happen later tonight. I forget about the things I have to say. I even forget about the girl I hoped would be here to hear them. Instead, I listen. I give my attention to the truths these people are all brave enough to share tonight.
“What a first round!” Stella comments, finding me still standing by the sound system after the intermission is announced; I’m sure the mic is going to give us more trouble before this is over.
“Killer,” I agree.
She lowers her voice enough that I have to strain to pick it up over the noise of the crowd. “Renee didn’t show, huh?”
I shake my head. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“Maybe she needs more time.”
I don’t think she needed any time in the first place. My hesitation is the whole problem here. I wasn’t ready, and she must have moved on. Maybe she’s too far ahead for me to ever catch up with her. Maybe I was never meant to at all, but I still wish she was here to see what she’s inspired in me. I wish she got the chance to see how much she’s changed my life. She deserves to know she has that power, that she can be such a strong force of good.
Owen calls for the end of the intermission a quarter of an hour later, and I feel the first wave of that rush I get every time I’m about to perform.
“This is the part of the night where we bring up our feature,” Owen explains as he adjusts his ever-present newsboy cap. “That’s a very special poet we select every month to entertain us with a few of their pieces and bore us to death with some sob story about their inspiration or how they got their start as a poet. We like to give the illusion of humouring them. Do not let the broad shoulders and intimidating physique of tonight’s feature fool you. He has an incredibly fragile ego, so please be nice. Tonight I’m pleased to announce that our feature is a homegrown Montrealer who’s been giving his all to the slam scene for who knows how many years. He’s also, so I’m told, a somewhat decent member of staff here at Taverne Toulouse and the whole reason we have this lovely venue at our disposal. I knew we kept him around for something. Please raise your fists for Dylan Trottard!”
The crowd whoops and holds their clenched fists up before releasing their fingers and shouting “Speak!” It’s how each poet gets welcomed to the stage, and it never fails to give me chills.
I don’t bother with an introduction. It’s not my style. I ignore the microphone and step to the front of the stage, starting things off with an older piece, one about my experience teaching the workshops. It means even more to perform it when I recognize some of the faces in the crowd as my students, still showing up to listen and perform all these years later.
“Whew!” I exclaim into the mic once the
applause fades. “Is it just me, or is it hot in here? You guys are on fire tonight. Actually, can someone go check the kitchen? My boss will kill me if this place burns down.”
Not my finest joke, but I get a few chuckles. Now that I’m up here trying to share something other than a poem, the first case of genuine nerves I’ve ever felt on stage threatens to hit.
“As our fashionably unfashionable hat enthusiast of a host pointed out”—I pause to grin at the sight of Owen flipping me off where he stands at the back of the room—“I work here at Taverne Toulouse. ‘Work’ almost feels like the wrong word. Yes, it’s a hard job. Yes, we all take it seriously, but we do more than just work here. We laugh. We tease the shit out of each other. We hold each other up when we’re down. Sometimes...sometimes we even fall in love here.”
A lot of sighing follows. So does a lot of people pretending to gag.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m a sap. What I’m trying to say is that this place is special, and that’s why it’s so hard to announce that I’m leaving.”
There’s nothing pretend about the gasps that follow my announcement.
“In December, I’ll be stepping down as kitchen manager. I’m leaving to start a certification in radio broadcasting this January.”
I don’t know what I expected from the crowd, but it sure as hell wasn’t deafening applause. A few people even jump to their feet, and the first one is my mom.
Get it together, Trottard.
I still have another poem to get through. I can’t lose it right here on this stage.
“Thank you. Thanks.” I stop to clear the lump from my throat. “That means a lot. It’s taken a while for me to reach this point in my life. In a pretty crazy and uncharacteristic turn of events, I wrote a poem about it all.”
“NO WAY!” Zach shouts from the front row just as people start cheering again.
“Yes way, my friend, yes way. So if you’ll indulge me, as Owen ordered you to do, I’d like to share a piece called ‘Miracle.’”
I fix my eyes on the middle of the crowd and draw in a deep breath. I let the poem start somewhere deep inside me, feel its heat growing, getter hotter and stronger, as it burns its way through my chest and up my throat, finding words to make the people in front of me feel its fire.
Then I begin.
“Popcorn butter on my fingers
Superhero movie on the screen
Kicking my feet against the theatre’s booster seat
Thump. Thump. Thump.
‘Would you shut that kid up?’
And then
The surround sound crackles
While a bolt of lightning streaks across the screen
Imprinted on my eyelids
Seared into my retinas.
It’s only sparks and CGI
But I am still young enough
To step through the screen and feel the tall grass brush my knees
Smell the burning ozone in the air
As a hero falls to Earth for the very first time.
I stand beside the woman on the porch of her farmhouse
Hear the wood creak beneath her feet
As she raises her hand to her lips and murmurs
‘It’s a miracle’
Just loud enough for me to hear.
I leave the theatre
With my mother’s hand in mine
And that word on my lips.
I do not know what it means.
I only know that some lights are too bright to stare at
And some moments make my heart rise in my chest
Like its valves and chambers have sprouted wings.
I repeat the word to myself as we leave:
Miracle. Miracle. Miracle.
Two months later we sit on a blanket
In a park filled with tall grass that brushes my knees.
The sky pops, fizzles, and bursts
With the brightest explosions I have ever seen.
They tear the sky to pieces
And I jump to my feet
Quaking with the roar in the air
To shout
‘Mom, it’s a miracle! It’s a miracle!’
And someone calls out
‘Would you shut that kid up?’
But my mother
Just smiles wide enough to catch every light in the sky with her teeth
And stares at the silhouette of her son against his first fireworks show.
I crawl across the blanket
Curl into her side
And reach for her reassurance.
‘Right, Mom? It’s a miracle.’
She does not correct me.
She does not tell me what miracle ‘really’ means.
She brushes my crooked haircut off my face
The one she cut herself with kitchen scissors and a bowl
And says
‘There’s a miracle in every moment we don’t take for granted.’”
I find my mother’s eyes in the crowd. She’s crying, tears streaking down her cheeks as she sits tall and graceful as ever. I let those tears seep into my poem, let them soak my sentences and wash over the crowd when I speak.
“With those words, she puts new lenses on my eyes.
She teaches me that parents are the optometrists
Of the way their children see the world
And suddenly I see them everywhere: the miracles.
The tickle of a ladybug’s feet
As it crawls across my finger
‘It’s a miracle!’
The way twisting one broken bulb
Turns the whole string of Christmas lights back on
‘It’s a miracle!’
The chalk outline my mother traces
Around my shadow on the sidewalk
To leave an image of me standing there
Long after I am gone
‘It’s a miracle!’
I hold my palm in front of my face
In the bathtub one night.
I trace the lines and indents
The ridges and grooves.
My hand tells a story
No one on this earth but me can speak
And I see it then:
I
Am
Miraculous.”
I raise my palms to the audience, let them see those lines and ridges for themselves, let them look for that same miracle in their own hands. When I continue, my voice is lower, somber, like a judge handing down a sentence it breaks his heart to give.
“But I grow.
I get older.
The lenses my mother put over my eyes
Start to fog and fade.
That man keeps shouting
‘Shut that kid up!’
And I start to listen more.
I make mistakes.
I do things that are the complete opposite of miraculous.
I can’t look at my hands anymore.
I stop waiting for miracles.
I shut that kid up.
Then one day
When I’ve gotten used to keeping my head down
This bolt of light streaks across the sky
And my neck is so stiff I can barely lift it
But I look up.”
I really do look up. Standing on that stage, I look up to the ceiling, and I see more than wires and pipes. I see something brighter than the spotlights shining down on me.
“I look up into her face
And every inch of her skin is a miracle.
The ridge of her nose, the swell of her lips
Her teeth and the spaces between them
The stray hairs always falling against her cheeks
The breath she draws into her lungs
And releases into the world
Every thought in her head
And every word on her lips:
She
Is
Miraculous.”
I raise my hands again, splay my palms to the audience like they’re a jury deciding my fate as I proclaim a testimony dra
wn from the deepest parts of all that I am.
“And how am I to touch her with these hands?
How am I to hold her with these arms?
How am I to look at her with eyes that have forgotten how to see?
Eyes that have learned to turn away from anything bright?
She slips through my fingers
And I stare down at my empty palms.
I trace the grooves I haven’t noticed in so long.
I remember a story
One only my hands can tell.
I remember a boy in a bathtub
I remember ladybugs and Christmas lights.
I remember my mother on a blanket in a park filled with tall grass
And I realize
That story is not over.
As long as my hands can open and close
They will continue to speak
And I will shape their words with my actions.
I will build more than I destroy.
I will climb and lift and dig.
I will undo the knots that tie me.
And I will hold her
For as long as she will stay in my arms.
I will count the miracles
In every moment I don’t take for granted.
I will count the miracles
In myself.
I will place my palm against hers
Feel the slide of her skin on mine
And say the words
I am strong enough to speak