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A few posts ago, I mentioned a mini-poetry-tour, and a few folks requested a blog post about it.

So here it goes:

Sarah Tarkany, Jacob Victorine, and I hit up Cincinnati, Akron, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC to read our poetry.

The first stop: Cincinnati, OH.

Sarah and I left Lincoln Square around 1:30pm. (Jacob wasn’t with us. He would take a Megabus to Cincinnati at 4am the next morning.) It took over an hour to get out of Chicago, and over 6 to get to Cincinnati. We were running behind before we got out of the city.

We read at Chase Public, a newer art space located on the north side.

The last time I read in Cincinnati, there were 30-40 people. This time, there were two. Two people showed up for the reading: the curators. We read anyway, and they bought books, and we talked for about an hour afterward. They were kind and funny, and we definitely felt welcomed in the space.

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Oh, yeah, and we were supposed to stay with the other reader. But he didn’t show up. The curators were nice enough to let us stay in that space. The couches were comfy, BUT outside, all night… sketchiness. And, right before one of the curators left, he leaned in, pointed at the front doors, and quietly said, “Make sure these glass doors stay locked. Someone got beat up in this stairwell.”

I didn’t tell Sarah about that till the next day.

Oh, and the bathrooms were outside of the locked space (but still inside). Apparently, Sarah saw a guy going into the women’s bathroom. He stopped, laughed, and said, “Wrong bathroom.” Then he offered to hold the door open for her so she could go in. Uh…

When I woke up the next morning, the door was open. I shot out of bed and grabbed my bag of books, ready to fight someone. Sarah was gone. I seriously thought, “Oh S&!%! She got kidnapped!” I went to the door, and I could hear her washing her hands in the bathroom. I went back to the couch, pretended to sleep, and when she came back in and locked the door, I fell asleep.

Later, I went to the bathroom, and Sarah freaked.

OK. We’re not a bunch of scared little kids. We were cool ’till the curator told us about the beating in the stairwell. AND, all sorts of sketch was going down outside—cars peeling out, cracking sounds, screaming, maniacal laughing, things slamming, weird conversations about god-knows-what—and to top it off, it sounded like there were people in the halls all night.

Sarah woke me up at 4am, and we grabbed all of our stuff. I looked out the window and checked the street: Clear. We went down the stairs and up to the glass doors: Clear. We unlocked the door, I unlocked the car, we threw the bags in the back, got in our seats, and we drove outta there, towards the bus station downtown.

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To be Continued …