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 recently partnered with Oddball Magazine. Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m.

On February 24, Stone Soup’s next feature is a product of Salem’s Zig Zag Poetry Open Mic series and it’s publishing extension Yes/No Press. One of the chapbooks they have just realeaed is Foul-Mouthed Imaginary Friends from Jeff Savlon. Read a sample from the collection and come buy it after his performance this Monday.

 

Middle River

Sasquatch examines the foam of wild white cascades
With thunder groans and anxious mitts
And there is no eastern sloping meadow
No western concrete lot
Only the river and its possibility of sustenance

Down-river serpents skim in shallow pockets
With pitchfork tongues exploring
Working in the middlemuck like demons plowing in their hellfields
Ignoring the philosophers on the left
And the reality television junkies on the right

And the surface dwelling bugs lugging sacks of disease
Busy looking for places to unload
Ignore the two hemispheres that stretch out for eternities
(Or at least for a few acres) on either side of the river

And the river separates
The eastern monolith from the western plain
The right arm from the left leg
The candle-bearing palm from the device-molesting thumb

It separates the monk from the executive
The wrestling coach from the mute
The protester from the executioner
The nun from the whore
The pacifist from the rapist
The extremist from its equal and opposite extremist
The extreme from the extreme
The holy matrimony from the one night fuck
The one night fuck from the edited edition

And one everyone and the other everyone feels at home
Sunday morning comfortable
On one side in spite of the other
Everyone, that is, save the Sasquatch and the serpents
And the disease-hauling blood-sucking bugs