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 August 10, we continue our Summer cool-down sessions and count down to the end of summer with a feature by Mary Ann Honaker, who will be debuting her new poetry collection It Will Happen Like This from Yes/No Press. Read an excerpt from the collection below, and we’ll see you this coming Monday.

 

She’ll Fall In Love

It will happen like this: one day,
she’ll fall in love with a painting.
The painting will be of koi in a pond,
seen from above, cees and esses
of orange-gold and cloud-white.
Like a sunset swimming underneath,

all of them twisted to the pond’s
geometry, for it is a concocted thing
their sleek longnesses weren’t built for.
Yet here they remain, trapped,

lodged in this lapse when the sky
is blue with summer and white with
want of water and the water is looking
back at it, mocking, repeating,

learning to speak the atmosphere’s structure.
Also the reeds lean over and the pond
mouths back their greenesses like a child
trying the flavor of each new syllable.

Ah, bah, mah, the pool says,
the stone-cut pool, the artificial
littleness. The price is high
but she will pay it, willingly pay it,

for the lie the lie that golden and white
are fine when twisted into cees and esses
and not allowed to learn out their lean
long frames into whatever it is they are,

fine swimming circles inside a child’s
syllables, learning the same curves again
and again, and fed by a hand, crumbs
from a mysterious descending hand.