Stone Soup Servings is a regular series for Oddball Magazine that features upcoming performers at Stone Soup Poetry, the long-running spoken word venue in the Boston area that has partnered with Oddball Magazine. Stone Soup Poetry now meets from 7-9 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery’s new location at 541 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. The open mike sign-up at 6:30 p.m.

On January 25, we are featuring Gladys Hidalgo, a poet who has been getting noticed on our open mic and our Stone Soup Poetry Slam. Enough that we feel a feature is already overdue. Read the poem below, and you should be convinced enough to be in the audience this Monday.

 

Lost

I have lost myself
to the culture of not being anything undefinable

Labels filthy with the blood sweat and tears
I have given to conform

The rumble in my thunder
has been on silent since I can remember

Daddy always said that I should shouldn’t fear the silence
I should embrace the sound of God’s rapture
causing chaos around me

If love is lost was there ever love in the first place
But there is no such thing as no love lost
between beaches of confusion and rising riptides

Robbing breath from those whose opinions are deemed
too loud for the sensitive ears of the miniature politicians to be

Forced to fit their hourglass hearts into square ideals
lest there be a sliver of hope left
for the hearts that remember their true shape

So many have forgotten what it means to simply be
and sometimes I just feel like being me

Breaking the mold they cast for my star shaped soul
squares were always too perfect for me
Years of being broken has only lead for my uprising

Anarchy imprinted in my mixed blood
I contain the history of the south east even the west if you fly in the right direction

My pen bleeds the tears I refuse to shed for the fallen
soldiers of a war we’ve been fighting since the beginning of time

Its never been so hard to be yourself

Living in a time where your God given skin is target practice
for those of differing shades
contradicting the law of nature

That is if they even respect it in the first place