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.

We hope you come tomorrow on October 5 to the SOUPed Up Beat Festival. Two of the event’s feature readers, Venus de Mars and Lynette Reini-Grandell, have shared poems with us to give you a taste of tomororow’s show. Read on below and be in attendance this Monday night.

 

In Memory of Tennessee Williams, Who Died In 1983 After Choking On The Plastic Cap of A Pill Bottle

Lord, let me die a dignified death.
And Lord, let me die with my clothes on.

I understand it might not be my favorite outfit,
but Lord, I need to feel covered up a little.
Skirts and shirts drift up;
I must always wear underwear,
as we used to say, “Semper ubi sub ubi.”

Lord, this means I can’t die in bed,
even if it’s winter, and I’m wearing a nightie,
those never stay put,
I toss and I turn and my hair frizzes up.
I’ll have to find another way
to sleep
if I’m dying in bed.

My college roommate was like Sleeping Beauty,
she reclined supine,
hair outspread behind her,
arms straight at her sides.
every time I sleep on my back
my throat dries out,
I gag.

I know I shouldn’t eat in bed,
I could convulse on a sandwich like Mama Cass Elliot,
or heave and choke like Jimi Hendrix.
Lateral sleeping has its advantages,
I still have to do something about my hair.

And not in a bathroom, God, anything but that,
please do not pluck me from this mortal coil in that little room
where various states of undress proliferate,
then there’s the toilet,
though I’m sure it beats dying in an outhouse,
surely the fate of some of my ancestors.

Would it be so bad to die in a shower?
But there’s Janet Leigh in “Psycho,”
and Elvis, maybe it’s not just location,
maybe I’d like to be dressed and not split my seams.
Maybe I’d like to not choke,
at least not on something everyone knows
I should know not to put in my mouth!

God, not like Tennessee Williams,
so far from the kindness of strangers,
so tired of tapping the electrified fence between him
and his grandfather’s church steeple.

Blanche DuBois could talk about God.
Maybe Tennessee’s sister, Rose,
thought about God,
so quickly,
before her frontal lobotomy,
maybe Tennessee prayed
when he visited Rose, when he wrote that he loved her,
each day she gaped open her mouth for more pills,
six more decades until her heart gave out,
with a brain the doctors invaded with knives,
poking around,
feeling with steel for some type of reset button,
maybe.

–Lynette Reini-Grandell

 

Electric Galaxy (song excerpt)

I am caught filthy — A temple of guilt
And rust is all I see — Though viciously built
I call for deliverance — It’s nothing to kiss
And pleading forgiveness –How callous is this?
A tragic refraction — Will scramble a dream
And scratch at a reason — And scratch at the seam
So this is my answer — And frozen will dance
And frozen will take me — A fire romance

–Venus de Mars