Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked from Stone Soup's open mic readers and features. I figure out a title (and sometimes the rest of the poem) later. You can read the other ones I've done since 2015 here. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels, this poem doesn't go up because it's ready, it goes up because it's Friday morning.
This Wednesday Stone Soup celebrated it's second ever online open mic. Stone Soup also experienced our first online trolling via Zoom trolls. Fortunately, between research and much needed help from Tim Gager (thank you so much, sire), we have learned how to prevent similar attacks in the future.
My crouton poems are still coming out quarantine-themed. Which is weird because I am still going to work and making occasional supply runs. Maybe I'll stop this trend if I'm actually sent home, but for now, this is another quarantine-themed poem. This was also (for me at least) an exhausting beast of a poem because I haven't had this many readers to Stone Soup in any way, shape or form in a long while. With each participant reading two poems apiece in a round robin, it was a little exhausting to write. Good thing I appreciate a challenge.
Hard to imagine I wrote long poems like this every Thursday night and Friday morning for years while Stone Soup was still in Cambridge. And in a few months? Time will tell. Thanks for reading.
At-Home
You neither know who you are
nor want to say where you're from,
afraid to be sent back to start.
They try to deport the elephant
in your own room, take blue
pencil to face, edit name.
You see them draw lines in sand,
and your body is their beach
they'd keep quarantined in a kitchen.
Drink your despondent smoothie
sans berries. It tastes like antichrist
and gasoline. Your second favorite.
Blender in the morning sounds
like a school shooting on TV,
and you know you're in trouble.
The ceiling's too low to fool you
into thinking you're looking up
and seeing Heaven. You sigh in alto
sax drawl. Someone is raising
the rent via form letter. All
you can do is stay in and wait,
one more hepcat without a porch.
Your manifesto manifests on your
bedroom wall. It beachheads against
the window, not corona ready,
but otherwise could dismantle
debutante balls and plague parties,
put old lovers in different states,
never to come back to your mind
mid-meditation. You build a bridge,
start it with no particular other side,
no one, no place, it can memorialize.
Life's become a piping hot panther pie,
dangerous to make and likely illegal.
Stick to soup, cans of it, smelling of
the last heartbreak the outside dished out,
clouds so depressing, you could have
painted them, dusted them off with
dander, last paycheck's crumbs.
Silence speaks loud enough to shake
the pillars all exes stand on. You don't
need more shadows in a bunker.
Someone calls out for a drumbeat
from a below balcony. You're not ready
for the living, still trying to figure out
if reality or dreams have more
ghosts now, no way to tell if one can
reach God faster indoors or outdoors.
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| The gang's (mostly) all here! |
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| I made my open mic sheet. Listening-only attendees included. Pretty. |
Special thanks to Natalie McVeigh, Tim Gager, Bil Lewis, Sarah Del, April Penn, Andrew Borne, Black Byrd, Russell Dupont, Ethan Mackler, Patricia Carrgon, John Lane, DiDi Delgado, Toni Bee, E.S., Navah The Buddaphliii, Jason Wright and Deta Galloway.
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