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 at 541 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. The open mike sign-up at 6:30 p.m.

This Monday, we are bringing Toby Altman to the podium for his feature spot. Rather than waste words introducing him in our words, what better way of introduction than the poet’s own work?

 

ENVOY (about the author)

scene: live, from the bowels of Arcadia…

• the poet, in his absence, sends an augury of his booty:

Toby: I sing my self for sale: blank, butter-light,
             and highly militarized. Once I drank
             my song and ate it too, but Rumsfeld was right:
             you go to war with the army you have.
             Now, fragrant in not-things and fluent too,
             pale Achilles walks his mother’s roses.
             Brittle as a grammar, man and his wound
             sing together and pick each other’s noses:
             “Whoso sinks his sex in funeral meat,
             some baked, some sweet, I know where is an hind,
             left by holy buddies to stain the beach.
             Do not touch him. He is Caesar’s in mind,
                 Circe’s in body: go to him and write,
                 ‘My love,'” (he coughs a rope of snot) “‘is like:'”