It was a Friday Night in Highland Park along North Figueroa. Just a hundred feet through the intersection with Avenue 61, every few minutes the cars of the Gold Line clanked by. Beside the tracks, several vehicles waited in the drive-through line at Taco Bell. To the right of the Americanized Mexican food, a slow trickle of poets entered the recently opened North Figueroa Bookshop.

Inside, Salvadorian American poet Ingrid Calderon Collins was busy reconnecting with poets she hadn’t seen since she hosted the open mic, They’re Just Words, at the former Book Show Books back west along Figueroa. Before a rent hike forced Jen Hitchcock to shut its doors, and a pandemic forced everyone into lockdown. Forced distance between these two best friends, Calderon Collins a person who struggles to trust people and make genuine connections.

On this first Friday in April, Hitchcock and Calderon Collins were back together to a degree. It’s due to a partnership that’s developed between North Figueroa Bookshop and Hitchcock that’s led her to have her own bookshelf in the store where she retains the profits from the sales of its books. It developed from the desire of the store’s owners, local indy presses Rare Bird Books and Unnamed Press to open “a literary space that seeks to connect the independent publishing community with readers, booksellers, authors and book lovers,” according to their website’s about section. With Hitchcock being a community partner, there was already a sense of trust that existed when the North Figueroa Bookshop asked Calderon Collins to host an open mic.

In March SERPENTINE kicked off. I arrived for its second edition. I had to. Calderon Collins was hosting. And warm memories of the community she’d built with They’re Just Words—respecting everyone’s words, meeting everyone where they were at, with their flaws and imperfections (the complex people we are) that created genuine connections—drew me to her new open mic. That, plus Mauricio Moreno was one of the evening’s two features, a local Columbian American poet I’d initially gotten to know through They’re Just Words.

It had been three years since I’d seen Calderon Collins and her husband John. who’s also a painter, and when he said “hi,” we fell back into a conversation about baseball, my Dodgers and his White Sox.

To an extent, it felt like the band was getting back together. Other They’re Just Words regulars—Karo Ska, Nikolai Garcia, Naomi Cornejo and Estefani Schubert, also attended. Each of us read, except for John. Hitchcock read an essay in progress, from a zine she’s making, chronicling her current breast cancer experience. I didn’t remember Estefani until she graced the mic as the other feature.

Most of the poetry was powerful, but it felt that more important than each poet’s words, were the interpersonal connections the poets and their friends were making and remaking. The need to make genuine connections with people who understand you.

Or, in Estefani’s case, as she said during her feature, she was glad to be back in Los Ángeles, after she’d moved to Salt Lake City to live with her long-distance boyfriend, just before the pandemic caused both of them to be stuck in his studio apartment, without an opportunity for her to explore her new city and build the social connections to sustain her outside of her relationship. The closeness too suffocating for the relationship to last.

Laughter, comfort and assertion filled the North Figueroa Bookshop as the Gold Line trains continued to clank down their tracks every few minutes and the sun disappeared into the Pacific 22 miles to the West.