Ypsilanti, MI. On March 6, it poured and poured like none of us have seen at the end of the week’s fog. I pulled the curtains to watch from the window sill of the Book Love Bar. The way outside looked like the dam of heaven had broken out, and the room felt like it too. The bookstore celebrates their one year anniversary.
Every first Friday at 7 p.m. was their monthly open poetry and prose mic. This month’s Friday night featured Forrest Hejkal, a local poet born and raised in Ann Arbor. His poems led in the tenderness of grief and witnessing, no, holding hands with the end. It is undeniable, the resonation of the room, as others went before and others after, as if a community came together to answer the same question someone had asked themselves silently that day. Someone in the room received news of that day.
However short or however long. However rare or however different were the answers of aurora borealis. The flood was one of the Northern lights. Who said the light always came from the outside of the room? Those flashes of purple-yellow thunder. The music of the ceiling and voices, what more in each seat sat, each their tender courage, the tears that were shed.
Book Love Bar’s first year anniversary was nothing short of a flood of light.