The Rhythm of Our Shared Verse

The poetry reading was pretentious but the poet was beautiful.

I knew it was pretentious because I’d been to enough of these things to recognize the signs: the way the mic was adjusted three times before anyone spoke, the audience nodding like they understood something profound when really we were all just pretending. The coffee shop smelled like burnt espresso and overpriced ambition. Someone in the corner was wearing a beret, unironically. I was there out of a sense of obligation to my own stalled creativity, a last-ditch effort to shock my system. My notebook, tucked in my bag, hadn’t seen a new word in three weeks.

And then he stepped up to the mic.

He had this way of moving like he was already halfway into a dream, all loose limbs and quiet certainty. His hair was dark and a little too long, curling at the collar of his worn flannel shirt, and his eyes—God, his eyes—were this impossible shade of brown, like coffee with too much cream, warm and watchful. He looked like someone who had read too many books and still believed in them.

He cleared his throat, a soft, rasping sound, and began without introduction. He read a poem about hands. Not metaphorical hands, not “the hands of time” or “the hand of God,” but actual hands. His ex-boyfriend’s hands, to be specific. The way they looked holding a coffee mug, the knuckles chapped from winter. The way they felt on his back during a thunderstorm, a solid, grounding pressure. The way they didn’t touch him anymore, and how the memory of their shape felt heavier than their absence.

It was too honest. Too specific. Too real. It cut through the performative fog of the evening like a blade. My own hands, resting on my knees, felt suddenly clumsy and empty.

And I couldn’t look away.

When he finished, the room clapped like they always do—polite, scattered, a few overzealous snaps from the front row. He nodded once, shyly, and stepped down. I watched him go back to his seat, a small two-top near the window, where he stirred his drink with a wooden stick and stared out at the dark street, effectively building a wall between himself and the room.

I should’ve left. I should’ve gone home to my silent apartment and pretended I didn’t feel something tectonic shift in my chest when he spoke. Instead, I bought another coffee I didn’t need, the bitter liquid a poor substitute for the warmth his voice had kindled. I walked past his table on the way to the bathroom, my shoulder nearly brushing the back of his chair. Twice.

The second time, he looked up.

His eyes caught mine, and for a second, the whole room went quiet. Not actually quiet—the espresso machine still hissed, someone laughed too loudly—but the kind of quiet that happens inside your head when something important is happening. He didn’t smile. I didn’t either. But he held my gaze just long enough for me to feel the connection like a live wire laid along my spine.

I went back to my seat, my pulse a frantic drum against my ribs. He stayed at his table. We didn’t speak. For twenty minutes, I pretended to read a flyer for an upcoming zine fair, acutely aware of the line of his profile against the window. I was formulating excuses to approach him—a comment on the poem, a question about the poet who’d read before him—and discarding each one as too transparent.

But when the host thanked everyone and the reading ended, when people started to shuffle out, shrugging into coats and mumbling about “grabbing a bite,” he was the one who moved. He stood. Hesitated, running a hand through his hair. Then he walked straight toward me, weaving through the scattered chairs with a purpose that made my breath catch.

“Hey,” he said.

His voice was softer than I expected. A little rough, like he didn’t use it much outside of poems.

“Hi,” I said, brilliantly.

“You looked like you wanted to say something.” He said it not as a challenge, but an observation, his head tilted slightly.

I blinked. “I did?”

He smiled, just barely, a faint crease appearing beside his mouth. “Or maybe I did.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. My heart was doing something stupid and fluttery, and I was suddenly, painfully aware of my appearance: a grey hoodie with a small hole in the cuff, jeans faded at the knees, scuffed boots. He looked like he’d stepped out of a black-and-white film about depressed artists who still managed to be devastatingly hot, his flannel open over a simple black t-shirt, his jeans fitting him in a way that suggested they were old friends.

“I liked your poem,” I said finally, grasping for the simplest truth.

His eyebrows lifted. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. It didn’t sound like the others.” I gestured vaguely toward the now-empty mic. “It sounded like it came from an actual person.”

He laughed, quiet and real, the sound warming me more than the coffee ever had. “That’s because it wasn’t for them. It was for me.”

We stood there, in the middle of the emptying coffee shop, while the baristas wiped down tables around us. We were an island in the quiet aftermath. I felt suspended, like we were in a snow globe. One shake and everything would change.

“You want to get out of here?” he asked, the question hanging between us, simple and immense.

My mind raced. This was the part in the story where the sensible character demurred, made an excuse, cited an early morning. I had an early morning. A deadline, technically, though I’d already blown past it. I thought of my empty apartment, the blank document on my screen, the silence that had begun to feel like a physical presence. I looked at him—at the earnest curiosity in his eyes, the slight tension in his shoulders as he waited for my answer. The risk felt tangible, a thrilling, terrifying precipice.

“I should probably…” I started, the automatic refusal forming on my lips. But then I stopped. I met his gaze. “Yeah. I really do.”

The tension in his shoulders released. He nodded, a quick, decisive motion. “Good.”

We walked out together, the night air cool on my heated skin. He lived nearby, he said. A fourth-floor walk-up. We fell into step, a careful foot of space between us. The city sounds—distant traffic, a snippet of conversation from a passing couple—felt like they were happening in another world.

“I’m Elias,” he said as we waited for a light to change.

“Noah.”

He tested the name. “Noah.” I liked the way he said it. Like he was trying it on, feeling its shape. “You write, you said?”

“I try. Short stories. They’re… struggling at the moment.”

“They’re hibernating,” he corrected gently. “Gathering material.”

I glanced at him. “Is that what your poems do?”

“Sometimes. Other times, they ambush me. Like tonight’s.” He was quiet for a block. “It was the first time I’d read that one out loud.”

The admission felt like a gift, a small token of trust placed in my hands. “Why tonight?”

He looked straight ahead, his profile sharp in the glow of a streetlamp. “It felt like time. To let it go. Or to see if it would float.”

His building was tucked between a closed bodega and the bookstore he’d mentioned, its faded sign promising “Used & Rare.” The stairwell inside smelled of pipe smoke, old paperbacks, and lemon-scented cleaner. He took the steps two at a time, effortlessly, while I followed, the climb and the anticipation making my heart pound.

His apartment was small and dim, lit mostly by a floor lamp with a crooked fabric shade and a string of fairy lights tacked above the kitchen sink. Books were its primary architecture—piled on the floor in precarious towers, stacked on windowsills, wedged into shelves that sagged respectfully in the middle.