Open mic night and the poem I almost skipped

By Dawn Visionary

Honestly I thought three people would show up. That is not false modesty — that is math based on every other event I have thrown where the RSVP list and the actual humans in chairs have only a passing acquaintance. Priya at the café said I could use the back room on Thursdays after nine. I bought string lights that turned out to be too warm and made everyone look like they had already been forgiven. I printed a sign that said Celestial Open Mic — charts, poems, stories, skeptics welcome — and taped it crooked on purpose because perfect signs make me anxious. Seven people came the first night. Twelve the second. Last Thursday there were twenty-three and we ran out of the good chairs and someone sat on a stack of poetry anthologies like it was a throne. I am Elena Garcia, Dawn Visionary online, astrology consultant at Celestial Insights, cat mom to Luna who has never attended but manages

to sabotage rehearsal by knocking the mic stand sideways at home. I started this because Seattle still felt like a city I was visiting even after two years of paying rent here. The open mic is not a reading for experts. It is a room where you can say I saw Jupiter last week and it made me call my brother, or I do not know my rising sign and I am tired of pretending I do, or here is a poem about rain that is not really about rain. That last one was mine. I almost did not read it. The poem I hid in my notebook I wrote it on the bus after Friday dance class when my body was still humming and my brain had not yet reattached to email. It was not good in the technical sense. The rhyme on the third line was accidental and I kept it because fixing it felt like lying. It was about the lunar eclipse I saw at twelve in Bellingham — the one that made me trust the sky before I trusted adults — and

about how Seattle rain sometimes sounds like that same hush. Backstage is not backstage here. It is the cookbook aisle. I stood between a shelf of fermentation guides and my own shaking hands and told myself I could host without performing. Then a college student read a piece about their grandmother's hands and the room got so quiet I could hear the espresso machine through the wall. Something in me said okay, you asked for honesty, go. I read the poem. My voice did the thing it does when I am scared — goes up half a note at the end of every line like a question. People clapped anyway. Not polite claps. The kind that means we have been where you are. An older man in a Seahawks cap told me afterward he did not believe in astrology but he believed in courage. I wrote that down on a napkin and put it in my journal next to transit notes. Charts out loud hit different In consultations I am

calm. I have language. I have the chart on the screen and the client on the other side and a structure that keeps us from drowning in feeling. At open mic there is no structure except take turns and do not heckle the moon. When a woman named Denise asked if she could read her Saturn return like a letter, I said yes before my professional brain could object. She called Saturn a strict teacher with a soft spot for late bloomers. The room laughed in the way that means recognition, not comedy. Someone else shared that they had been avoiding their birth time for years because they did not want another label. I told them labels are not sentences — I say that in sessions all the time — but hearing myself say it in a room full of strangers made it land harder in my own chest. That is the thing I did not anticipate. Hosting would teach me more than performing. I thought I was building community

for other people. Honestly I was building a mirror with twenty-three angles. Luna, the podcast, and the part where I panic Luna destroyed my first microphone cord the day the literary podcast invitation arrived. I am not saying those events are related. I am saying Luna has timing. The invitation was to co-host an episode about celestial imagery in fiction — not full co-host, one segment, still enough to make me google breathing exercises like a person who has never spoken in public despite doing open mic monthly. Contradictions are my whole personality. Priya offered to cater the next open mic if I named it after the shop. I said no because branding kills the thing for me. It stays Celestial Open Mic. It stays pay-what-you-can tea. It stays the crooked sign. The podcast producer said my voice has the quality of someone who still wonders aloud. I choose to take that as compliment. Monday

and Wednesday I meditate before work. Saturday I stargaze. Thursday now belongs to the room with string lights and people who bring their own mugs. Luna stays home and knocks things over there instead. Fair. Closing Reflection If you are in Seattle and you have a story that involves the sky even sideways — a dream, a breakup under a full moon, a time you felt small and it helped — come on a Thursday. You do not need a chart. You do not need a poem. You can read a text you almost sent. You can say I am here and that is the whole piece. I am still nervous before every open mic. The poem is still not technically good. The sign is still crooked. The city feels more like mine anyway. Catch you under the stars! ✨