The Night the String Lights Became a Ceiling

By Dawn Visionary

Last month I was a wanderer. I followed applause through Green Lake Park and found poets reading beneath strings of warm lights, words passing between strangers like bread at a long table. I wrote a poem on a napkin that night, folded it into my pocket, and went home feeling like I had stolen something beautiful from the universe. That is how my relationship with wonder worked for a long time. I collected it. I never once asked where it came from, or who held the ladder while the lights went up. So when the Seattle Arts Council called to ask if I would organize a city-wide poetry slam, I laughed into the receiver. Me? The girl who shows up late to her own open-mic nights because she stopped to photograph a mural? But the voice on the other end was serious, and it mentioned my name, and it mentioned the bookshop, and it used the word curatorial, and somewhere between the mural and the

phone call I realized that the wonder I had been collecting had quietly started collecting me. This is the story of what happened when the string lights stopped being a ceiling of leaves and stars and became an actual ceiling, with permits and posters and a stage that someone had to build. It is not a story about poetry, exactly. It is a story about what it means to stop finding magic and start making the room where magic is allowed to happen. The Collector of Moments For years I treated wonder like a berry I happened upon. A hidden mural in an alley, cello and violin folding together at Pike Place, a rooftop garden bursting with flowers above downtown, a sudden rain that pushed me into a café where the chai tasted like a decision the universe had already made for me. I wrote about all of it. I never built any of it. The distinction felt important. There was a purity in receiving, I told

myself. To build felt like bragging, like pinning a butterfly to a board. My grandmother kept a travel journal, and I found it the week before I left for Europe, pressed flowers falling out like bookmarks she had left for me on purpose. She was a receiver too, I think. She wandered and wrote and let the world hand her its small gifts. I loved that about her. But she never held a stage, and I never once asked her if she wished she had. The innocent in me wants to believe the world will always hand me the next beautiful thing. That is the gift of my archetype, and it is also the trap. Wonder that is only received is wonder that stays a visitor. It visits, it delights, it leaves. Somewhere along the way I started wanting wonder to move in. The Invitation That Grew a Roof The Arts Council did not ask me to read. They asked me to hold. A city-wide slam means a venue, a sound check, a lineup

of poets I have never met, a crowd that paid for tickets, and a promise that the night will work. Every open mic I ever hosted lived in a bookshop where a friend owned the register and the worst-case scenario was a quiet Tuesday. This was a different altitude entirely. My first instinct was to say no, and I want to be honest about that. The innocent shadow whispers a very kind lie: stay small, stay cozy, stay safe, and the world will keep delivering wonder to your doorstep. It is a seductive voice, because it sounds like self-care and is actually fear wearing a cardigan. I said yes anyway. Not because I stopped being afraid, but because I finally noticed the difference between the fear that protects me and the fear that just wants to keep the lights low. The oak tree in Discovery Park did not ask permission to be tall. It simply grew where it was planted, and the meditation group

gathered in its shade without ever being invited by the tree. The tree was the invitation. What Hosting Actually Is I thought hosting was performing. I thought I would need to be funnier, louder, more magnetic, some version of a stage person that my quiet earth-element self has never been. Then a poet I admire called my anthology piece a beacon of fresh, innocent insight, and I understood something. The thing people gathered around was never my polish. It was my sincerity. The string lights did not perform. They just made the dark friendlier. Hosting, it turns out, is mostly watering. You prepare the soil, you check the weather, you make sure the lights are warm and the microphone does not hum, and then you stand back and let the poems do the growing. My job is not to be the best poet in the room. My job is to make sure every poet in the room believes they are allowed to be heard. I

think about the mural in the alley, how the colors needed a wall to live on. I think about the rooftop garden, how the verses in my notebook needed a place to land. Wonder has always needed a container. Someone has to hold the wall, hold the roof, hold the hush between one poem and the next. I finally understand that the receiver was always practicing to become the host. Closing Reflection The first slam is three weeks away. The posters are printed, the venue is booked, and somewhere in Seattle there are poets who do not know yet that the room will be built for them. I am terrified, and I am also, for the first time, the one holding the ladder. If you write, come read. If you listen, come sit. The string lights have a ceiling now, but the dark is still friendly, and there is always room for one more voice under the glow.