“Can I be honest with you?” Olivia nodded at me. Her eyes were big and glassy, like a bug’s, behind her coke-bottle lenses. “This poem is… bad. I mean, don’t get me wrong. There’s potential, but if I were you, I’d just scrap it and start over.” Her hair was curly, but she didn’t know how to style it, and it ended up in large frizzy waves that made her look like a mad scientist. She was a scientist, not a writer. She had her head propped up on her hands, her elbows on the coffee shop table, waiting for me to say more. I couldn’t think of anything, so I reached into my bag and pulled out a plum. I stuffed it in my mouth, so she’d have to talk instead. She didn’t speak. She only spoke when she really had to. The only way I had access to her was through her poetry. She just watched me chew, and when I had finished I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find your poetry, sometimes, to be… inaccessible.”
She looked despondent, and that was the hard part about critique, wasn’t it? It’s difficult to receive criticism, but even more difficult to dole it out. Most people don’t think that way. Some people are eager to pull out their big knives and slash them across your poems and tell you that your repetition is redundant, and your metaphors are saccharine. But I liked Olivia, and I felt it was my responsibility to be honest with her. She was honest sometimes too. She pointed at my hands, “you’re stained,” and indeed my fingers had turned red from the plum. “You’re so sweet,” I said as I accepted her hand sanitizer and napkin.
Since we’d met, she’d been sending me one poem a week, and “they’re all steady in quality,” I said to my coworker at the university’s library help desk, “it’s just that the quality isn’t very good.” This made her laugh, and it was nice to be in on the joke. I had been talking about Olivia all morning, and the thoughts just kept flowing from my mouth. I tried to contain them to a page in between checking out books for people or putting them on waitlists, but my pen could only make circles in my notebook. Little circle, big circle, until the whole page was blacked out. Ooooooolivia. She was hiding in those circles somewhere. Even though she shouldn’t be. A girl with frizzy hair and big glasses isn’t ripe for creativity. I wondered if she slept with a retainer. Her teeth were so uncannily straight, she must have had braces.
“Her poetry is all over the place content-wise.” My boyfriend was lying on his back, phone in hand. I could tell he wasn’t listening, but I continued anyway, “One week it’s birds, the next week it’s her mother. I can’t figure it out.” He cleared his throat, which meant he probably wanted me to go back to my own apartment. “Not that it’s worth figuring out,” I said as I pulled my pants back on. I opened the door and there was a girl standing on the other side. She was wearing leggings and had her blonde hair in Dutch braids. She was surprised to see me and said something to my boyfriend about leaving his jacket at her apartment. I stepped out and let them argue. On my walk home I thought about Olivia.
We met by chance in the dining hall our freshman year. I was confidently advertising myself as a poet, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater with my hair in a sleek bun that was secured with pencils. She sat her giant hamburger next to me and asked, “Can I sit with you?”
“Sure, but I’m a vegetarian.” I looked at her bloody burger. She shoved it away and said she was an engineering major, “but being an English major sounds so much more interesting. What do you want to do with your degree? Teach?”
I scoffed, “Why does everyone ask that? I am a poet. I’m going to publish poetry books, and I’m going to get a job in publishing and move to New York.” I could tell by the way she was licking her lips that she wanted to be me. She reached out to touch my star shaped earring, and I slapped her hand away.
“Isn’t that weird?” I called my friend from high school a few after Olivia and I met to tell her about the strange encounter. “And every time I see her, she still looks at me like that. Like she adores me. I don’t know if I should find it cute or creepy.”
“If it creeps you out so much, why do you keep offering to read her—? Oh shit, sorry. I gotta go. The baby’s crying.”
Senior year, fall semester, and I hadn’t even come close to finishing my capstone. I didn’t even have a topic in mind, and I felt I had no way to approach 30 pages worth of poetry, “And she’s never been in a single poetry workshop. If she likes poetry so damn much, why isn’t she here doing the work?” I slammed my hand on the table. I was telling another English major, who I really only saw in classes, about Olivia. Our senior seminar workshop had just been dismissed for the day, and I caught my classmate before she stood up to leave. “Maybe she’s busy?” she offered. I laughed while saying, “That’s the thing! I looked up the course catalog for engineering majors. It doesn’t matter what kind of engineer she is. She’s allowed to take three electives of any discipline!” My classmate said she had an advising appointment and had to go. On the chalkboard someone had written: Post grad plans?
Midway through the spring semester of senior year, Olivia didn’t send me a poem to read. I refreshed my email for hours until finally I received one. “An invitation? I mean can you even believe it? An invitation to a poetry reading. I mean who does she think she is? How did she even get funding to host this? I bet she has rich parents who are putting it on for her. Seriously. Or it’s an open mic or something. How weird would that be if she made a little personalized invite to an open mic?” My roommate was in the bathroom, and I was talking to her through the door. “I don’t know if I can stomach going and watching such a train wreck. I mean, it’s going to be a disaster. She doesn’t even have anything legible to read.” She turned on her hairdryer.
I double checked the address on my phone. This was the right place. It was an industrial looking building downtown. There was a bouncer. “Invitation?” I showed him and he pointed me down the stairs to a speakeasy style bar with a little stage. The venue was packed. It’s pretty small though. A girl jumped out of the crowd and grabbed my arms. It was Olivia, she was wearing contacts and had her hair in a sleek bun held together with pencils. She was wearing a turtleneck and moon shaped earrings. I reached for my own earrings, but I had forgotten to put them on before I left the house. So unlike me.
“Is this an open mic?”
She laughed. “No. I wish it was to take some of the pressure off of me though. My publisher was so sweet to get me this venue.” She put her hands on her cheeks to shield her embarrassment, as if she didn’t feel worthy of all the fuss. I clutched my bag filled with half-finished poems that I had prepared to read in case the opportunity arose.
“Publisher?”
She pointed to a table of books. The cover was an image of a woman with a yellow beak and a feather wig. “I would have told you sooner, but I wanted it to be a surprise. It’s been in the works for so long now. I’m so glad I don’t have to keep it a secret from you anymore.” I had been stung by some sort of toxic insect. That was the only way to explain why my throat and tongue were swelling, keeping me from screaming and ripping up those books, and eating the pages. She guided me through the packed audience and put me in a seat at the very front. She left me alone for a minute. “Olivia never looks like that. She’s usually wearing glasses, and she’s very self-conscious about her poetry,” I said to the man sitting to my left, speaking out of the corner of my mouth.
Olivia returned and handed me a golden chalice. “It’s a special drink. I had them make it just for you. I’ve got to go now, it’s about to start.” She guided the chalice to my lips, and motioned for me to drink before she skipped up to the stage. It was a fruity, bitter red wine. I looked down into the darkness of the cup, and saw my reflection, but it was rippled by a tear that had fallen in. The lights dimmed, and a single spotlight lit up Olivia’s face. After she introduced herself, she said, “Before I begin my reading, I want to thank my first reader of all of these poems you will hear tonight: my best friend.” she pointed to me and waved at me to stand up.
A white light was on my face, and even though I was temporarily blinded, I could hear the claps of the audience. They were clapping for me. “You can sit now,” someone in the audience said. I was swaying, so I sat down and tossed back the rest of the wine. It was making my body feel warm like I was being touched by someone from the inside out. I wanted to get more, but Olivia started reading. At that moment, I could only hope that someone would come into the room and end my misery by way of gun or strangulation. If only I was not so ineffectual, I might have done it myself. I might have done it all myself, and I would be the one standing on the stage, and Olivia would be sitting in the front row seat instead of me.
My goblet had grown heavy with tears: too heavy and difficult to hold once my hands had become replaced with paws. I dropped it on the floor, and made a loud crash, but Olivia hadn’t lost her rhythm. Nothing could interrupt her reading, not even me being changed into a golden retriever. I jumped out of my chair and onto the floor because I needed to scratch behind my ear. I tried to protest my transformation, but only barks would come out. Apparently, my barks were very impressive because people stood up to clap at my speech. I ran up onto the stage and sat next to Olivia. It felt so wonderful to have people cheering for me! Maybe it would not be so bad living as Olivia’s dog. She began feeding me fruit and announced her forthcoming work. I hoped she’d feed me some ground beef when we got home.
“My next book of poetry will be inspired by my muse, my best friend!”
She offered me another piece of fruit in exchange for sitting up on my hind legs and waving to the crowd with my new feet. Everyone went crazy, yelling that it was the most exciting thing that has ever happened in a speakeasy poetry reading in the downtown area of the city. Olivia’s birth mother had died, and she needed a new source of inspiration, and she had chosen me. How special was that? Maybe it would not be so bad being Olivia’s dog and her one true best friend. I would finally be famous through her work, and she would take me on tour with her. I could bark to the meter of her sonnets. Yes, it would be so nice to finally see her apartment and rummage through her garbage, and chew on her shoes. I’d only chew a tiny bit to remind her that we are still equals in some ways even though being a dog was much better. After all, it was so hard being a human in this crazy world.