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 September 2, we welcome back poet, playwright and teacher Tom Daley, who will be performing his Emily Dickinson play Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her Irish Servants at the Amherst Poetry Festival in Amherst, MA on Sunday, September 21, 2014. A sample from his more recent work follows.

 

After a Stroke, and Infected by the Bacterium, Clostridium Difficile,
My Mother Listens to the Morning News on Public Radio

For the Wichita pox and the measles
For the tuberculosis sanitarium, for the penitentiary
For the southern plains’ slithering ice
For the tuberculars and their casino
For the pneumonia, sleeping out among the text messages
For the exposures in the felled rivers
For the slopes of Styrofoam, for the exaggerated snowfall
For the visionary amputations, for the magi with their gangrene
For the mash of single digits, the Creole Hot Lips
For the burning patriot in front of the gold-domed state house
And the New Year’s without pumpkin soup

Bless the insurgency, the renunciations
The really bad guys versus the recapitulations
The fighters who are paid more than the farmers
The tribe or the sidelines
Bless the bypassing, and the directly
Bless the coin, the worry, the women
Bless the advocates who cause the clock
Bless the spermy development, the opportunities
The decade troops. the sensible combat, the timeline of provide

I inhere and strategize
I mind neither sweetness nor phenomenon
I conflict with the walker women, the wheelchair sameness
I startle in the stubble where they topple
I expand with the dry diapers
I know they cannot know the gentle
I know they cannot blind recoveries
I know they are deciding my hydration
They are a hybrid and a wind chill
They are nearing their trances
That thing that happened to us
Their songs and despondencies
Their malfeasance, their dreadlocks, their tinted hair
Falling in a single braid to their waists

All interview long the cock’s crow
Can single out the twenty-third psalm
The bishop has declared the earthquake the will of God
To build a new land out of beleaguered infections
To starve in the honor of the voodoo chiefs
Of the revolution’s pact with the Devil
The hardest part is the living, the borders stacked like cordwood
The night wails, the dogs who list and keen
Always the staving off solid ground
The blunt of feed and house
The windowsill as projectile, the mattress as move forward.