What do you want on your Tombstone?

Do they make one with green olives?

I got to the Love Song Bar in Los Angeles well before the event started, when the bartender had enough leisure time to make me a complicated cocktail, a foamy egg white thing that was so full he poured the extra into a second glass and gave me that too. I was there for a group reading by a bunch of contributors to several Midwestern literary magazines, and I was early enough that I had my choice from the banquette seating that lined the wall. Walking there from the bar, my drink sloshed over the edge of my glass every time I took a step. After I’d spent a minute auditioning different places to set my sticky glass - the bench next to me, the floor, the chair rail - I decided to make friends with the person who was sitting at one of the only tables in the room. I subjected her to 20 minutes of mindless chitchat while the room filled to capacity, and then the program began, different readers who had published pieces in the three magazines getting up to read poems and snippets of prose.

It turned out that my tablemate, Gyasi Hall, was one of the night’s featured readers. She was the second-to-last on the program, and the audience was happy, whooping after every reading, excited to cheer people on. (Gyasi was always one of the people who whooped for the readers.) When it was her turn, she wended her way through the standing-room-only crowd to the stage area in the front of the bar that was designated mostly by a spotlight, and read aloud from a piece of paper in her hand. It turns out that my tablemate was the standout reader of the night. People loved her poem, about Tombstone Pizza, and you could see that she knew she was reading something good by the wild look in her eye. She had three poems in a series she’s working on, which she called “eulogies for 90s TV commercials”, and in the rapt silence while the audience waited for the second one, she grinned and whispered, “Silly.”

As she made her way back to her table, humming with the adrenaline of having given a good performance in front of an eager audience, she passed an acquaintance who pressed her hands to her heart and said, “I can’t believe I know you!”

Me neither! What a lucky night it was for all of us. We’ll get to read these poems sometime. Maybe you can be the one to publish them.