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Lost Flamingo Company met up about once a month. Near the beginning of the semester, the handful of us in the poetry slam group would brainstorm slam theme ideas. Huddled in a circle in an empty dance studio off of Court Street, I peered down at my paper and thought.
“Last time it was Teenage Angst! This time I think we need something more universal?” said the slam group leader.
I shrugged, “You mean, like about space?“
Everyone laughed and we continued to brainstorm. After two more meetings, we settled on the theme of 7 Deadly Sins. It was each of our jobs to go out into the world and find inspiration. Once we’d scribbled enough, we all came back to meetings and opened up our hearts to each other. Poems about body dystrophin, about gender, about wishing you had a different life.
At the time, I was a junior at Ohio University. It was the fall semester and I was still reeling from the adrenaline of living off-campus and away from home the first time. On hot summer days, my roommate, Nikki, and I dipped our feet into the cold bathtub water and passed around a box of Francis between us. I loved studying literature, but sometimes the bureaucracy of classes with mostly white professors trying to establish some kind of literary canon leaped over my head or made me angry.
Wishing I was more stimulated by my classes, I sought a literary community off-campus. At first, I attended Front Room Fridays at the cafe in Baker Center because I didn’t know how to make friends that partied. On Fridays, white boys strummed sappy songs during acoustic covers and sometimes a student magician showed up. I started to read the poems in my journal, as well as short stories. Sometimes on my residential green, I’d meet someone that saw me read at a Front Room Friday and they’d say, “You’re that writer, right?”
This question and the fact that I could nod in response made me smile. By the end of my sophomore year, I ventured off campus to attend Poetry Nights at Donkey Coffee on Tuesday. In that back room of Donkey, students and locals sat around wooden tables and in recliners as seasonal artwork hung on the walls. The poems ranged from brutal depictions of collegiate depression to chapbook series about heartbreak.
I read on a weekly basis and became a regular. I made other writer friends there and by the time, I knew what bars didn’t card, I also had writer friends that liked to drink. At a bar on the West Side of Athens, we’d gather around a pitcher of PBR on cold winter nights and rummage through our notebook. My closest writing confidant of the time, Jake and I, often reach poems each other and interrogate the meaning.
That was poetry to me, feeling hard and trying to make something beautiful and ephemeral.
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