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 8-10 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 7:30 p.m.

Join us Monday, January 26, for the debut feature by poet and activist Hannah Brown, whose poetry and photography has previously appeared in Oddball Magazine. Read one of her newest pieces below and be in attendance next week for much more.

 

Blink (New Year’s Poem)

I blink, imagining
almond-shaped days and nights passing
at the rate of breaths
between my eyelids.
I imagine my openings
create the shape
days hold.
And it’s then I remember
years are just moments,
moments we read like
old novels and new faces for clues
about future,
for maps
to the past.
It is moments
that leave fault-line creases
in our eyelids, leave birthmarks
on flesh and rock.
Some years are collisions
and vision is born
of the crash.
Our vision is born
from saying hi to strangers,
listening
to babies laugh,
from honoring loss,
manifesting
honest love,
from breaking
at weathered joints,
from days we remember
decades by,
from points of contention,
from the people we unwittingly assign
to the pronouns
in poem lines.
Most years are moments
that are too big
to feel
for just a moment.
So I ask my arms
to open a little wider, i ask my mind
to jump a bit higher, my racing heart
to stop waiting for time to catch up.
And I blink, imagining breaths
can hold parachutes up.