First Monday Spoken Word Open Mic Night is a monthly gathering of writers, poets, essayists and creatives. We meet at the Ada Public Library at 6 p.m. on the first Monday of each month.
The October 2026 featured reader was Open Mic regular Zach Hobia.
Two Thoughts from the Journal
by Richard R. Barron
- Cool night. Footsteps on the stairs. Clouds witness my tension as I wait for Darla or Lee or the last person I’ll ever see.
- Fire and wind from the sky laugh at my frail heart as I sit in the unwelcome darkness, remembering your smile. “I’m afraid,” I whispered, “that when you come home, you won’t love me any more.” *
The Cruelty and the Kindness
by Richard R. Barron
“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot says at the start of The Waste Land. My 11th grade writing teacher told me The Waste Land was the only true epic American poem ever written.
Eliot spent most of his adult life in England, so he didn’t understand that in Oklahoma, August is the cruelest month.
It’s so bright, you can hardly hear. It’s so hot, you can barely feel. It’s so humid, you want to die to death.
But the cruelest thing about August is when a baseball coach wants to shake your hand, and his hand is drenched in man sweat.
So cruel.
A poet in our midst (Sam) says he feels that October is the cruelest month, citing the various emotional elements that autumn, darker days, chimney smoke and the cold days ahead can bring.
That was me 25, 30, 35 years ago. Letters about tears in her eyes. Saying our innocent goodbyes. The cold rain on my face.
But by the time I was 40, that all changed.
October and I meant she and I dressed in flannel, put handmade sweaters on our dogs, and drove to Moab or Santa Fe.
We wrote our names in the frost like teenagers.
There was hot coffee in the mornings, hot barely soup in the evenings, and those days were filled with brilliant autumn sunshine in the brilliant blue autumn sky.
The roads through the mountains, her hand in mine, breakfast and a hike, tired in our motel room at the end of the day but almost unable to wait for the next tomorrow, the next sunrise, the next canyon, the next hillside, the next road ahead of us…
October is the kindest month.
* The punch line is that she never actually loved me.