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.

This Monday, we have our Stone Soup Slam, but we also have a micro feature with Yuri Hospodar, a figure from Stone soup’s history who is visiting the country for the first time in years. Read a sample from his impressive work, then get to the Out of The Blue Art Gallery early. You can catch an early show before the show and you can sign up for the slam!

 

Elegy! 70 Joy Street (Boston Ghost Song)

OK, parade before me yet again,
beloved phantom mannequins
of pasts I’ve put in boxes

sitting as I am in flimsy exile
playing ever after the old songs (, Sam)
avoiding the faces that rise and press
so hard against my glass of
decades-made and artificial face –

!
and here we are again!
akitchen and amingling, wordtesting,
eating Jack’s pasta in poverty glee,
cast planning cascade down the wobbly stair,
the fallen and enduring
who I will not name
for names are triggers, targets for tears
(at least the helpless whimpers mine)

but!
here we are!
gathered and triumphant
in the small brown glow of aggressive art.

I am there, and look!
you are – there –
and there she sits, she-wonder of the word or film;
we do not need Walt Whitman ‘midst the cantaloupes
to glow our love of melting, merging
Boston word.

Next to her sits the other,
And you! Other –
and those lovelies
circling toward the reading
later in the eve, all us/those
assembled in a blissful fog –
such ashouldered-trying giants!

Give us a challenge, we say,
circling the small table;
we will write the Word in words.

Look, we, decades-gone,
tiny windows plants-clogged stared
toward Weiners’ door uphill
and all his disassembly –
a phone call and a galaxy away.

There will be time – no, it is time
To downstair and encar toward Cambridge
Where the drunkenarts await,
the shrapnel and beloved of
what limbs are left of Muse
who’d called us to this fading form

but ever will be are
and us, together,
lived, and lost
survived, remembering,
all ambition to build sound
survivors or unforgotten fallen-by
(O Todd! O Jack!
I said I’d say no names)

in that warm night
enfrozened-formed
acrust of wintersummers and
avoices of the dozens t/here
to celebrate and magnify The Word
(that word! The Word! again)

before Bitch Time enceded
declarations of her awful law
that those alive accumulate the loss

and lost here now we sit
remembering the memory of sound

or sound once heard
now memory-ear’d
of humid summer/frozen winter nights

silent
upon a hill
on Joy Street