©Jennifer Davidson Marshall

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 January 6, for our first feature of 2014, we have Teisha Dawn Twomey, a recent MFA graduate in Poetry from Lesley University who has also recently joined Wilderness House Press as Associate Editor. She has performed this past year at venues such as Ekphrastic Poetry in Jamaica Plain and the annual Boston Poetry Marathon.

 

Coming Home

I reach below the sink, compare
 the proofs
of the bottles beneath. Eighty is best

and I pour the glass
 half full, watching
the diet Coke turn gold, beautiful as amber.

I climb the stairs
 the way I am use to,
as a child tiptoeing to my bed­room.

I do not wake the man 
in the master bedroom,
his hands gripping the bruised arms of his woman.

I sleep 
above the shot­gun my mother had hidden
below my mattress and forgotten about long ago.

It waits there. No one suspects the room
with the unicorn wallpaper. I am just visiting

tonight. I have this secret beneath the surface.
I try not to roll over. Some­thing might go off.