BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 26th

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Open Mic Highlights

• Edie inadvertently (or was it advertently) re-started his Brockton vs Chicago feud with Amy by reprising his “5 outlandish facts about Brockton” poem about how Brockton is the *true* Windy city. Amy, for what its worth, responded for a second time with a great new poem written at the bar, deconstructing the sound and the many definition(s) of the word “Windy”, and landing on the line “What good is it to be correct if you are a poet?”

• Abby M’s sweet tale of office friendship and the bittersweet reveal of their upcoming job interview with with a different company

• Open mic regular Jocelyn gave us a great farewell-for-now poem! I can’t confirm if this is accurate, but the line I have written down for it is “I’ll trade you my dreams for unused isotypes” (!)

• In Jack’s piece, his contact lens broke inside his eye, so he spent the day unintentionally winking at people while waiting for treatment, which led to a meditation on perception and also, ridiculousness

• Who else but Nick Roberts would write a sonnet entitled “Richard Nixon as Chronos”

• March re-read an Allston Christmas classic: “the mouth of ephemera kisses me back”, Dani gave us our first really sexy poem in a while, and the recurring poem theme of “Inside me there are two wolves” reached critical mass when the audience spontaneously howled in the middle of Tim G’s poem!

Feature

Tonight we had our now-annual Allston Christmas FOUND POEM slam! After a last-second sacrifice group piece by yours truly and Shivank (we literally worked it out 20 seconds before we went on stage!) we had 10 poets come on stage to battle for a glowing pile of discarded detritus that Myles and Zeke found on the street!

Highlights:

• Shawn’s found post of “What will make my son less likely to drink a white monster energy drink?”

• Newcomer Celia’s esoteric Facebook group post(s) about the strange things people keep in jars, and how to preserve them (it’s better if I don’t go into the gory details!)

• Edie’s real-life letter from the Dean of their university asking for a disciplinary meeting after the theatre group crossed the line by performing a play that crossed the clergy with graphic LGBT sexuality

• Isaiah’s re-write of a speech from the TV show “Survivor”, with all the pronouns changed to the word “Empire”, and all mentions of the word “Island” replaced by word “Earth.”

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have a feature from Arizona’s Skyelyn Riggs-Davis, and an early bird workshop by a well-known Cantab-regular-of-the-past, Tom Daley! Workshop starts at 6:30, open mic starts at 8, feature at 10!

Workshop description: We’ll be taking a look at the sonnet and how to use it as a love poem and a political poem. We’ll start by reading two Shakespearean sonnets, one from the nineteenth and one from the twentieth century. We’ll discuss the form, and then start working on our own poem.

Feature Bio: Skyelyn Riggs-Davis is a transgender performance poet from Mesa, Arizona. His work predominately tackles queer struggle, family dynamics, and what it means to be an Arizonan in a rapidly changing landscape. In 2024 he toured with Ghost Poetry Show, and in 2026 with Body Slam, competing regionally at Chicharra Poetry Slam Festival in Albuquerque, NM and Bigfoot Poetry Festival in Portland, OR. Skyelyn is the current 2026 Arizona State Poetry Slam Champion. In July of 2025, he went on to place 4th at the Blackberry Peach National Poetry Slam. Skyelyn represented Arizona again at the national competition in 2026, winning first place in the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition. Since 2024, Skyelyn has hosted BODY SLAM with Atlas St. Cloud and Evie O’Toole- a wrestling-themed, bracket-style poetry event in Phoenix.

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 19th

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Open Mic Highlights

• Shawn welcomed the ire and heckles of the audience by performing “Golden Silence” to start off the open mic. You guessed it, it was a silent poem! Some of the heckles included “What makes it golden?” “John Cage?” and “Is this freak shit or thin ice?”

• We’ve had a lot of newcomers on the mic post-Northbeast! Shout out this week to Sabrina, Ellie, and Hallie’s “Lovesick Ramblings Of A Sociologist”

• Edie on ADHD “waiting mode”, where you can’t enjoy anything in the present because you have plans to do something later on that day

• Will S’ defiant and persistent ode/manifesto of W-H-I-M-S-Y

• Returning poet Abby (as opposed to open mic regular Abbie) read about eating a Nutella ice cream cake for 7 straight mornings because, well, they miss you

• Aparna delivered a poem reflecting on creating yogurt and its living cultures, which is only the third yogurt poem I’ve heard on the open mic in 15 years, but well worth it!

• On the opposite end of the spectrum, Stevie Subrizi made sure we made it THREE WEEKS IN A ROW where a poem about a plague of locusts was read on the mic! Is this catching on?

Feature

The tag team slam returned tonight! Teams of two battled it out for $75 apiece and the chance to be invited to the 2027 BPS team selection slam. After an indie sacrifice by Myles, and a group piece sacrifice by Will S and yours truly, the slam started in earnest with some tried-and-true individual work that was great to hear again, like Amy’s piano-playing metronome piece, Will L’s poem after Carlos Williams, and Jarvis’ Letters from Grindr, but as expected, the team group pieces stole the show! Amy and Shivank’s “I was naked once” (not the title of the poem, but the first line!) mused deeply and dramatically about the absence of cream cheese on a bagel, Abbie and Edie pitted the archetypes of the architect and the engineer against each other, and Will and Jarvis braved and bared it all with a poem centeried on their experiences with STIs. The big winners were the team of Abbie and Edie (“Ebie”), who were the most consistent in the eyes of the judges! Lots of fun and great poems were had by all!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, come out for our annual ALLSTON CHRISTMAS SLAM! Celebrating Moving Day across the city and all of the treasures we find on the sidewalks, this will be a FOUND POEM slam — anything you “found” works. It could be a flyer on the street, an email in your inbox, a post from your feed, or something you overheard on the sidewalk. Poets will slam their found piece head-to-head and the winner will get a selection from our prize pile!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 12th

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Open Mic Highlights

• Edward Gault’s magical realism tale of “The Sink That Ate Hyde Park”, filled with nightmares of dirty dishes howling at him, potential radiation poisoning, and jail time instead of getting the key to the city

• “I want someone to find me in the place where the electricity comes from” – from Edie’s poem about the ghost light in the theatre

• “The flea that bit John Donne could never understand this” – Nick Roberts on platonic love

• New ways to read a poem aloud: Abbie L’s piece had the audience make buzzer sounds every time Abbie raised their hand, and when Will S kept his hat on, he read from an old poem, and when he took his hat off, he read from a new poem that commented on his old poem

• Response poems galore: Sue Savoy on recency bias after an Aparna poem that was after Zeke Russell, and Kai writing about an “indeterminate amount of wolves,” after Abbie’s poem that was after Shivank

• We had another short-but-sweet Haiku slam, featuring some new work by Ed and first-timer Ember, but in the final round Edie (using the tried-and-true method of writing meta haiku about the host) took the victory over Mar!

Feature

Stevie Edwards returned to the Cantab to feature for the first time in 14 years! A no-nonsense poet whose straightforward style engaged the audience before slowly revealing a cutting talent for momentum and moment-capture, Stevie breezed through a set revolving around themes of new-found sobriety, (pan)sexuality, and the decision to not have children (see also our recent feature by Chiara Di Lello!) We also got our second (!) poem in two weeks about (being) a plague of locusts, a poem about animals that self-reproduce (and others who wish they could do so), a striking litany survivor poem about “what we carry”, and a good old-fashioned nerdy piece about competing in marching band. Thanks Stevie!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, it is the return of the TAG TEAM SLAM! Poets will sign up in teams of two and face off against each other in a three-round competition. In round 1, each team member will send up one team member to perform an original poem. In round 2, the teams will send up the other team member to perform an original poem. In the FINAL round, the remaining teams will each send up a group piece featuring both team members!

The winners will get $75 and the top two teams will qualify to try out for the 2027 BPS slam team!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, August 5th

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Open Mic Highlights

• One of our 2026 Northbeast workshop leaders Leticia opened up the mic with a piece melding locust plagues with human intimacy and physical touch

• We had a lot of first and second timers on the mic this week! Shout out to Austin, Len (“Things that feel intimate but maybe aren’t”), Alexus (“when I was a kid / I was a velveteen rabbit”), Willa, and Lindsey

• Meredith’s ode to cooking (“the least amount of pots used wins”), Jocelyn’s slow creep through the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum through an abundantly hot day, and Mar’s personal experience with parents with multiple children who claim they don’t play favorites

• In the freak shit column, Finn detailed a long and flirty DM conversation with spinach, and Shivank wrote a kind of abecedarian that included numbers (“1A” “2J” “10K” ) along with the letters, and then followed that up with a poem in disguise as a list of sharks

• I can’t say this describes Jason’s poem accurately, but what I have written down for it is “so, life is running its tongue against the socket of a dirty lamp’s electricity…”

• Sue Savoy did a meditation on how it would be impossible to watch a movie of her life, Jarvis regaled us the tale of ripping his pants in Natick at Level 99, and Briana closed the mic with a bittersweet poem about how Boston is constructed for leaving and transience, how it seems made for distant memories

Feature

Beloved poet and former BPS staff member Kat Anderson was the feature tonight, reading from her first collection “Etymology of Break” as well as some brand new work! All the trademark(™) elements of Kat’s work was on full display: her love of photography (a disposable camera was passed around for the audience to use), well-constructed contrapuntals, themes of lust/regret, poems about queer joy and the love of community spaces that were published in small zines and local publications, the indefinable sense of self (“I am an adjective the refuses to be in the dictionary”), and a touch of the silly/ridiculous where she read some of her first attempts at poetry in 7th and 8th grade. Thanks Kat! Welcome back.

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, renowned poet Stevie Edwards returns to feature at the Cantab, and we also will have our normal open mic that will include our monthly haiku slam!

BIO: Dr. Stevie Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Weather Inside (University of Arkansas Press, 2026), Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls. Her work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, SAFTA Firefly Farms, and Buinho Creative Hub

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, July 29th

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Thanks to everyone who came out to the 2026 edition of NORTHBEAST this weekend! It was an incredible success. Congrats to Just Beloved for taking home the title, and to the BPS team for finishing in 4th!

Open Mic Highlights

• It was a night for the freaky poets! We had several first-timers/old-timers on the mic delivering weird, trippy, and esoteric work tonight. Host Amy even commented that it felt like a spontaneous Freak Shit/Thin Ice slam developed out of thin air!

• Austin paced around the stage speaking about how “everyone knows someone who’s grandfather died in a mining accident”, Ken sing-chanted faster and faster in rhythmic/rhyming circles, and Shivank’s poem was set in scenes, including a recurring rhinoceros at the pharmacy counter

• “Never knowing what saves the body is the scar” – Renee on loss

• “The fastest way to make someone a liar is to believe them” – Ed Wilkinson

• Myles weighing in on the definitions of being trans and cross-dressing, and family members who say thing like, “why don’t they just get the surgery if they want to dress like that?”

Feature

The 2026 Boston Poetry Slam Team featured tonight! The team presented 11 poems, with 5 (!) being group pieces, showcasing the team’s strong desire for collaboration and writing together. Jarvis performed their non-binary Macho Man Randy Savage persona piece as well doing a group piece version of their “I like my friends wet” piece. Bobby reprised their poem in the voice of the stewardess who was on the same flight as DB Cooper, a group piece with Aparna on how nature repeats itself, and a group piece with Will about clothes, closet space, and skeletons. Mugs and Will did two group pieces relating to their trans identity and transitioning, one using taxidermy as the central metaphor, the other revolving around the probing questions people consistently ask them. This is a definitely a “pushing the art forward” team, with group pieces not based on loudness/quick talking, but a kind of spaciousness and almost ambience that is rarely seen in competition. If you haven’t gotten a copy of this year’s team chapbook, we will continue to have copies at the door until they sell out!

Coming Up This Wednesday

Beloved former host and staff member Kat Anderson will be back in town to feature this weekend, promoting their new book!

BIO: Kat Anderson (She/They) is a Panamanian poet born, raised, and living in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her first collection “Etymology of Break” was released with Game Over Books in May, 2026. Her previous work was most frequently shared within the privacy of Boston Poetry Slam’s weekly show, where she was a regular attendee, volunteer, and board member for 3 years.

See you soon!

– MFG 🚪

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Northbeast Starts Today!

The 2026 NORTHBEAST REGIONAL POETRY SLAM AND FESTIVAL is this weekend, starting today July 31 and running until Sunday, August 2nd! Buy tickets HERE!

Read more about it (including the full schedule of events) in today’s BPS NEWSLETTER!

See you there!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, July 15th & July 22nd, 2026

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The 2026 NORTHBEAST REGIONAL POETRY SLAM AND FESTIVAL is this weekend, July 31 – August 2nd! Buy tickets HERE!

Open Mic Highlights 07/15

• “You do not have to be bitten by a Catholic Saint, you can be bitter by a non-Catholic Saint” – directions for applying to an experiment run by Shivank’s poetry

• “Dear Earth, date me” – Emma on carbon dating

• On his Cantab anniversary, Will S wrote a golden shovel about crying at a Noah Kahan concert, and later on the mic Jayda wrote in response to Will’s “You will not die on route 1” poem

• Also inspired by Will S, Aparna wrote a poem using anagrams of the word “anniversary”, which prompted your recapper (Michael F Gill) to also re-read their anagram poem about how “Hotel In Paris” anagrams to “Relationship”

• Ed and Myles both wrote about apocalypses, with Ed commenting how it is only supposed to happen once (!) and Myles reflecting on how their cat being sick makes everything around them feel like an apocalypse

Feature 07/15

This week we had an open poetry slam! This was not for the faint of heart, as it was full of heavy hitters likely practicing for Northbeast. Bobby sac’d his DB Cooper poem that wowed the judges enough that he ended up tied with the second highest score of the night! Rich W, Mugs, Abbie, and Edie all performed well, but the final round was between Ed Wilkinson (reading under the name “Ward”,) and Will Leonard. Will (our current grand slam champion) took the win with a poem after Carlos Williams’ classic “Wet Paint” and is one of the first to qualify for the 2027 BPS team selection slam.

Open Mic Highlights 07/22

• “The list of things I’ll never stop missing is growing too long” – Jocelyn

• Open mic favorite Alia said farewell to us for now by reprising the first poem they performed on the mic, read in both Greek and English

• In an unexpected mind-meld, Jarvis (who wrote in response to Aparna’s “I dream of my mother on her deathbed and…”) and Jayda (who was right after Jarvis) both including lines in their poem about how they hope to be a tree when they die

• There was a short but sweet haiku slam that was won by Will S, but 2nd place finisher Abbie had a great meta-haiku in the first round about being the same height as their opponent, so they didn’t have to adjust the mic stand!

• Wolf poems are now a common occurrence on the open mic! Philip G added one of his own, prompting Shivank to re-read his later on in the night

•Jack’s trippy conversation poem between two people (“I keep seeing the moon during the day”) and Renee’ crescendoing poem on loss and relationships (“I started making a country of your absence”, “I feel your heart may break before it bends into my hand”)

• Long lost former CUPSI poet Chris delivered an incredible piece on grief and the emptiness of drugs after the initial highs: “There is a circle in hell where you are given everything you ever wanted and it doesn’t do anything”, “My favorite thing about grief is that it makes everything about itself”

Feature 07/22

Our feature was one of New England’s favorite performance poets/educators/organizers: Mckendy Fils-Aimé! After being a member of many slam teams and literary communities in the area for over 15 years, Mckendy has finally released his debut full-length collection, sipèstisyon. Mckendy read generously from the book, which revolves around themes of generational trauma, healing, and superstitions. Highlights include a mermaid revenge poem after a Lupe Fiasco song, spooky work about the Loogaroo, and a piece on learning karate as a kid and realizing trauma may be a combat sport. You can watch the feature again on our instagram! Thank you Mckendy. Be sure to buy his book!

Coming Up This Wednesday

On the eve of Northbeast, the 2026 Boston Poetry Slam Team will be featuring tonight before they compete this weekend! Expect an hour-long set featuring solo and group pieces from Will Leonard, Aparna Paul, Bobby Crawford, Jarvis Subia, Mugs Myers, and Kai Wallin!!!

BPS will be one of 16 teams facing off in Cambridge at the 2026 NORTHBEAST REGIONAL POETRY SLAM AND FESTIVAL this weekend, July 31 – August 2nd. Buy your tickets HERE!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, July 8th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Emma’s wild and ragged “Forced Femme Uncle Sam” which is just what you think it was about, and appropriate for July 4th…

• “We stood there waiting for someone to make the next move” – Gel’s description/conundrum about continuing to be in love / in a long-term relationship

• “The afterlife might be full of regrets” / “Does the afterlife have privacy settings?” – Sue Savoy

• Philip G’s entertaining “Boy with spaghetti noodles for arms” and TJ’s response poem to Abbie and Shivank that was a conversation between so many wolves!

• Jarvis’ “Poem in which I F&%* Mitch Mcconnell” and a surprise group piece from Amy & Kelsey involving photo sessions, beauty standards, and the commentary around it.

• “This poem is either called ‘Not Your AI Girlfriend’ or ‘Too Wet To Be AI'” – Lynette

• “I am trying to dig a hole deep enough to never see the bottom; I am building a wormhole to spagettify existence” / “My social anxiety asks me to leave the room, but everywhere is a room” – March Penn

• Brynna’s “cookie cutter” found poem where each line was written by one of their students, and a tantalizing excerpt from Briana’s long poetic narrative on sex and sorrow

Feature

Our feature was the return of the BOX OF DOOM Slam! 8 brave and unsuspecting poets reached into the box to reveal what nefarious/hilarious piece of writing our community members dropped inside! There were so many shenanigans!

Host Brynna opened things up by reading a dramatic post by a Japanese man who visited a Mexican restaurant and couldn’t believe the chips and salsa that he filled up on were free (“Honor demanded they be finished / I have been defeated by generosity”). Shawn had to perform “10 Common Lovemaking Mistakes” (#1 – Standing On The Bed), and Isaiah amped up “Things I Would Do If I Had a Penis”. Abbie read posts about the most boring car ever (the 1999 Toyota Corolla) and about the person who may have engineered the world’s worst burrito. Old friend Cam S was back in town for one week, and smoothly related a tale about someone accidentally “killing” a dummy during CPR training class.

The top performances of the night belonged to Jayda and Em Roth, who managed to elevate their material in ways the source material may not have actually deserved! Em Roth (our overall winner) somehow poured a lot of straight up *emotion* into Spongebob’s “I am a goofy goober”, as well as an internet post complaining about “poop in my fingernails”. Jayda may have been dealt the most awkward hand, having to perform “Think U The Shit (Fart)” by Ice Spice, Cardi B’s “WAP”, and “The Diarrhea Bounce Back” by The Toilet Bowl Cleaners. But Jayda performed them all straight-faced, with a strong sense of gravitas and perfect diction! An incredible feat that this recapper will not soon forget. Thanks to all who performed and those who stuck around to watch it all go down!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have our normal extended open mic and an open poetry slam! If you have 3 poems that are 3 minutes or less, you can compete for the chance to win $75! The top 2 slammers will also qualify for the 2027 Boston Poetry Slam team selection.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, July 1st, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Ave Maria opened the mic off with a memorized and well-crafted piece about honey, despair, and pulling oneself back from the ledge

• River’s ode to bathroom graffiti and the unhinged “conversations” that happen on stalls (PS the Cantab bathroom graffiti is great!)

• What I have written down for Nick Roberts poem is “The nymph in the damp glasses is stagnant but on the side of profane love”

• Normally an out of context line like “OCD? You can OCDeez Nuts” could indicate a problematic poem, but Jesse pulled it off and had the crowd and host Myles laughing by the end!

• Iris’ masked jabberwocky-esque poem, and Abbie’s piece after Shivank “Two Wolves” poem, imploring “Just one wolf please, I’m not greedy”

• John Lee’s moving farewell to Boston poem that involved both Boston and Celtics loyalty, even as the Jaylen Brown trade was announced, and showed how emotionally (and perhaps irrationally) invested he is in the team and city. We’ll miss you John!

• Kat Gunther on both the kindness and anger of random strangers while traveling by foot or bike

• Kai with a devastating poem about a Father’s Day gift that made them reflect on their own troubled relationship with their dad, and how others have learned to be kind from their father

Feature

Scott Beal was our feature this week! A poet with an incredibly soothing voice and whose (memorized) work flowed out like conversations with a kind of lyrical hypnotism, Scott read both new and work during his well-crafted set. Highlights include “Love Poem That Becomes the Wikipedia Entry For Ambrosia Beetle”, a piece about signing divorce papers that also invokes facts about stegosaurus, and a golden shovel using the chorus of “Toxic” by Britney Spears. There was also a touching piece about their child realizing they were gender queer, and a closing piece that entertainingly told the history of chicken soup (“I hope you catch a vicarious buzz through this poem”). Thank you Scott!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This Wednesday, as part of our community night, we are doing a Box of Doom slam! Unsuspecting poets will reach into the box and reveal their fate: will they be reading a poem, a reddit post, an overly wordy recipe, or one of the other wacky prompts the staff have inserted? There’s only one way to find out! Show up tonight and try your hand at slamming for this always-entertaining event!

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, June 17th & June 24th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights 06/17

• There was World cup fever at the beginning of the mic! The Tartan Army from Scotland was in the house, and first-timer Bryan Bonner covered Robert Burns beautifully

• David Sherman’s letter-poem to the Cantab revealing his kinks, which are “talk to me in the subjunctive mood,” and items of obsolescence like working phone booths and communicating via handwritten letters

• Claudia Wilson returned to the mic for the first time in about eight years to read an excellent epic poem about the aftermath of their hair (“at the bottom of the ocean is the remnants of my hair”)

• “My love language is driving you to the airport” / “Some friendships deserve to survive capitalism” – John Lee

• “I had the dog in me and then the dog ate the poem I was going to show you” – Shivank

• Jarvis had a memorable turn hosting, giving the audience a series of “daddy jokes” (we don’t call them dad jokes anymore) and later reprised his great “Macho Man Randy Savage” persona piece

• Renee’s poem that invoke a whole slew of philosophers to help her understand the nature of relationships

• Our haiku slam was won by Slam Free or Die’s Christopher Clauss, who made the audience laugh for extended periods of time between each haiku!

• “Hope has been lynched here and made a flag” – from Briana’s incredible piece on the violent legacy of southern states and U.S. black history

Feature 06/17

We had a TREAT of a feature this week! Local poets Will Leonard and Tru Kwene, 2026 slam champions of BPS and Just Be(Loved), combined forces to craft a full set together! The set was threaded around both the struggle and the joy of being queer or trans, but with a sense of openness that each poet was gifting each poem to you directly. The meta-titles of each poem reflected this throughout the set: Kwene’s “Here is my queer poem,” followed by Will’s “Here is my trans poem”, followed by a group piece that merges both of their voices. I urge you check out the video of the set on our instagram right now! We are so lucky to have both Will and Kwene in our local community!

Open Mic Highlights 06/24

• It was an open mic filled with group pieces from the BPS slam team! Will Leonard paired up with Mugs, Bobby, Kai, and Jarvis for a quartet of pieces that had a slower-burning, spacious, inquisitive feel, as opposed to the normal “wall-of-sound” crescendo that is often heard

• “The only script I read from is the truth” – Jayda

• Gel was on “thin ice” as he sang about RFK having a worm living in his brain to the tune of “Yesterday” by The Beatles, but it was probably the funniest poem of the night!

• It was great to see former BPS team member Skylar Paape and former BPS feature Legacy Thornton on the mic again, who both delivered standout poems about coming back to one’s self and the (non-existent) secret to happiness

• “Even our breathing held hands” – from Briana’s “Letters From Lovers Of My Body”

Feature 06/24

This week we debuted the FREAK SHIT vs THIN ICE slam! For each round, each team wrote on the same prompt, with Team Freak Shit writing in a more surrealistic and experimental way, and Team Thin Ice writing at the borders of what could be considered a poem by blending other distinct genres. Your recapper (Michael F Gill) had the pleasure of doing the sacrificial poems for both teams in the slam!

Slam highlights include Myles’ verbal concrete / “paint-by-word” piece describing Allston as he sees it, where every inch of the imagined photograph was a word describing what is there (“sky” “prudential center” “grass” “moped delivery guy”) and the poem was read from the top of the image to the bottom.

Writing on the theme of Texas, Kay told us about the difference between bigness and largeness, went deep on the science of why the air is actually heavier and thicker in Texas, and linked this density to the moment she publicly announced her relationship with her girlfriend.

TJ gave us a very funny “infomercial” for a workout app, in the style of a motivational speaker/snakeoil salesmen who also sounds like he’s 100 years old. Amy wrote about learning to play the piano, and, with the sound of a metronome playing in the background, told us how she learned to change the speed of time by playing pieces too fast or too slow, and all the mental games that come into play when you consider how many mistakes you’ll make depending on the speed in question.

There was an incredible amount of strong new work shared in this slam, with Thin Ice taking the win in the final round! Thanks to everyone who took part in this new format!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week’s featured poet Scott Beal has kindly offered to not only feature for us, but to run our monthly workshop as well! Workshop at 6:30, Doors at 7:15, Show starts at 8, feature at 10.

FEATURE INFO: Scott Beal is the author of Stegosaurus Moon (Dzanc Books, 2026) and Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014), as well as the chapbook The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in journals such as Rattle, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and have received awards including a Pushcart Prize. He directs the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts at the University of Michigan and teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing. He co-hosts the Skazat! online poetry series and co-edits the literary journal Public School Poetry. He’s performed at the Cantab Lounge, the Green Mill, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and elsewhere. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

WORKSHOP INFO: In this workshop we will examine poems by Thomas Lux and Brigit Pegeen Kelly that use humor, radically imaginative imagery, and surprising turns to complicate our understanding of abject creatures (tarantulas, scorpions). Then we will write our own poems in which we use language to explore and reach for difficult empathy for beings that inspire distrust, disgust, and fear. You’ll end up with a cool new poem, and perhaps even a more nuanced view of someone or something with whom you’ve had a difficult relationship.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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