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 October 24, Joyce Angela Jellison returns to us for a full-length feature, and we are excited to have her back. We hope you read today’s poem by her and that it convinces you to join us this coming Monday.

 

Counter Clockwise

Sometimes in visiting past lives
Traveling
In borrowed skin
Bearing
Latticed
Scars arranged in crisscrossing trauma
Just
As neatly as freshly baked blueberry pie

I become a whisper
A former shifting self

Watching
Listening
Crouched
In the pulsing density of
Memory
A murmur
A bruise

In borrowed skin
I make love
Dare
to
seek pleasure
anonymously
fraudulently

all the while
Finding comfort
At least quiet
In the
Folds of
Another life, the flesh of pilfered identity
The counter clockwise
Beating of heart
The rhythmical throbbing of
Arteries
Pulled
Backward, a bloody reversal of living
The timing, scheduling, deliverance and indifference to defining humanness
The Grinding of teeth
The routine
Catch and release
Of oxygen
The calculated disposal of toxins
The steadiness of another’s
Fears
Therein is a mutiny of sorts
A radical transitioning

Blasphemous thieving

Using a strangers hands
to love
to batter
to heal
to masquerade

This borrowed body
This
Worn and leathered
flesh
more garment
than organ
Yields easily
to possession
Takes macabre
Pleasure in disambiguation,
the fileting
neatly,

Precisely
Spirit from pearl white bone

This body stinking to high heavens of
Dispossession
Aching with chronic emptiness with
a belly shrunken and hardened to stone
wraps itself with desperate giddiness around
an interloping
Spirit
Mouthing
Salted lies

With barely
A whisper
more a groan
a yielding

More
Of murmur, a sigh

A watch rewound

To time a faint pulse

A borrowed
Repentance

Crouched in the
Density of memory