Stone Soup Croutons, 7-5-23: To The Unknown Refugee

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions selected from Stone Soup Poetry'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.

 

I also have a book collecting the best of my first year of poems. Click here to purchase it.

Thanks for reading.

 

This past Wednesday was a little different, as C.C. Arshagra guest hosted a night with special feature Paul Skiff. I was mostly absent and handling family affairs. 

Thanks to an imperfect recording I made, I got to hear the whole feature, wich on top of Skiff's impressive performance (including a magnum opus dedicated to his home in New York's Lower East Side), it was a great showing of new poets and regulars. I'm glad everyone came out in force. I hope you can do so next week when Len Germinara and Sarah Oktay feature next week.

I also hope to supply you with C.C.'s recording along with a list of the participants if C.C. kept a paper list. For now, here's the poem. 

Hoping to write a poem with stanza breaks and zero word repetition soon. Thanks for reading.

To The Unknown Refugee 

 

Every lost soul wants their face

put on a soup can label while 

they reside in Paris, privileges

carried over from stateside,

Stone Soup Croutons, 6-28-23: The Longest Last Day

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions selected from Stone Soup Poetry'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.

 

I also have a book collecting the best of my first year of poems. Click here to purchase it.

Stone Soup said goodbye to June--and with it, Pride Month--on Wednesday. What I post today is more of a footnote. More than one poem referenced the famous Stonewall Inn. The poem below is and isn't about Stonewall. It's about the loss of space. Something I feel these days as all of Boston uses the pandemic as an excuse to shrink my city.

I appreciate C.C. Arshagra bringing together one of of our largest groups of the year (seriously, every time I thought I was ending round one of the round robin, someone else would join us). I'm also grateful to Rita Rose and Bryan Franco for their almost bookend Stonewall poems that helped give my poem shape. 

I'm thankful if you were safe this Pride Month. That needs to be said more than ever these days. Thanks for reading.

 

The Longest Last Day

 

Musician on bar's stage plays sadly.

Saw a dog in the street that looked 

like his long lost pooch, lost to last

eviction and higher rents with no 

pets. It would take a spy novel to get 

the little guy back. They'd have to