BPS Recap For Wednesday, March 25th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Kyle M’s poem reflecting on the discovery that their grandfather was a queer photographer, which they only found out after they also became a queer photographer

• First timer Aanchal’s memorized bread & cheese piece. Aanchal also stayed late to judge the slam!

• TJ Jones’ sincere and surprising “Sapphic” poems dedicated to Logan Lopez

• Jack’s wild collection of dreams they’ve had over the last couple years, and John’s charming ode “Cows are the best”

• Amy on the family ties of magic, making food disappear, and failure

Feature

Special recap written by Myles Taylor!

The room was laid out 180-style. Quote bubbles from past poems lined the walls. A tiny DIY photo booth sat in the corner. A questionably chicken-shaped cake sat on the front table. It’s Team Selection Finals Night, baby.

Finals is our biggest show of the year — eight of the top slammers in the city battle it out for the honor of representing the Boston Poetry Slam at competitions locally and nationally. This year’s finals was a nail-biter full of ties, upsets, and shenanigans, but five poets came out on top. 

Our two sacrificial poets were beloved regulars and accomplished slammers Isaiah Newman and Mary S, who kicked off the room with work old and new, respectively — these garnered a 24.5 and 26.0, establishing a scoring range from high 7s to low 9s.

Then the door was kicked down by Aparna in the 1 slot, with a classic rendition of I Forgot You Were Queer, getting a 27.5. Kai followed up with a gorgeous newer poem on the page exploring universes where they and their mother can be happy: 25.2. 

After this point, the scores began to meld, and I began to sweat, because ties are the bane of our collective existence. Logan put their heart and soul into a rendition of Open Letter To The Trans Firefighter, Who Wore A Dress To The Firehouse Banquet. Logan already knows what a fan I am of this poem, after working on it during their time on the team in 2023. Mugs rocked the room with a dispatch of life as an EMT with a gut feeling. Jarvis brought their new poem of the year: This Is My Trans Love Poem, an ode to all the folks in their life who are trans and uplift their transness. These three poems ended up with … a 26.1, a 26.0, and a 26.1 again.

Bobby Crawford, returning to team selection for the first time since 2016, broke up the 26’s with a poem about grief, recipes, and a beloved bartender — 27.7. Then Edie debuted a new poem about witnessing a workshop for the unhoused, which got … a 26.1! Another one???

Going last in the first round, Will put the trend away for good with a confident rendition of Photograph that blew the room up with a 29.1. While he was firmly in the lead by this point, with a couple other poets edging ahead, it was very much anybody’s game.

Jarvis opened round two with KILL A CEO!, a rallying cry that the people happily rallied behind. A couple drops in the performance may have ended up docking their score, because they walked out with a 27.0. Logan followed with a gorgeous new poem that pushed the art form forward, Boy Audition, then Kai came on stage with their memorized, fourth-wall-breaking ADHD piece from NorthBeast 2024, Unmedicated. The judges were still warming up to the idea of giving higher 9s by this point, leaving Logan with a 27.3 and Kai with a 27.4. 

Bobby followed with a poem on page about harm, space between people, and the things we don’t talk about, with a 27.7. Then Aparna came up with her new poem of the year — written yesterday-ish, mind you, but still memorized and frankly flawless. The poem orbited a white woman in a conservative school district blacking out their textbook section about dinosaurs. Aparna gets a 29.4!

Mugs follows with his contrapuntal for gender identity, pulling two gender experiences into one. Judges decide they like form and give a 27.6. Then Will does something I have seen very rarely at the Cantab Lounge, especially during a team selection … he gets a perfect 30 for This Is My Trans Poem! 

Edie closes out the second round with Embrace, an ode to the people who will hold you when you need to be held. Edie gets a 26.2, for some reason. At this point, things are looking interesting.

Will and Aparna are pretty much mathed onto the team. Bobby is looking pretty good for it. But everyone else is pretty much even, off by a matter of a point and a half. It’s anyone’s game, and there’s two spots on the team to claim.

Mugs opens round three about the difficulty of reclaiming the word “whore” and gets a 27.9. Logan tells us a story about a Peter Pan bus full of trans boys, teeming with Axe body spray, screaming, and every experience the passengers never got to have. This one really got me, but the judges remained locked into their low 9s with a 27.4. And then Will did a thing I REALLY haven’t seen at the Cantab Lounge — got another 30?? Will did Devil in a way none of us have heard it before — loose, confident, confiding, honest, and deeply human. This leaves Will with the highest cumulative score I’ve ever seen in team selection history.

For the second time, Edie has to follow Will after a 30, and does what I believe to be their best rendition yet of Bones. The judges remember there are decimals between 9 and 10 and give Edie a 28.3. At this point, Jarvis comes up with Stay With Me, their beautiful, locally-famous piece about holding onto life for the beauty and love it can provide. Stay With Me, for those who were there, got a perfect 30 at NorthBeast 2024. For now, it gets a 29.6.

With this score, Jarvis has pulled away from the rest. But what’s it looking like from here? Mugs has slightly pulled away from the middle of the pack, sitting in the 5 spot. But it’s not impossible for Kai to catch up from the last slot.

Bobby does a poem about ice dancing and whether or not perfection exists, earning, appropriately, a 29.9. Sometimes slam is hilarious. Then Aparna hits us with their triple-contrapuntal, Rivers — the room loves it, and so do the judges. 29.5!

So it’s all down to the last poem. Can Kai catch up to Mugs? They do what I believe is also a new piece, on the page, about their father and being “the other one.” It’s a beautifully-constructed piece — it’s a risk — it’s … a 28.5. Four tenths of a point behind Mugs! With this, Kai bumps over Logan to secure the 6, the team alternate position.

That’s your slam, folks. Harrowing, stress-inducing, adrenaline-pumping, both celebratory and tragic. I cannot stress enough how amazing all of these poets were. Everyone brought their best selves and it showed. If you weren’t in the room, you missed greatness. Maybe catch it again next year! And get ready to catch the team’s performances throughout the season, locally at NorthBeast Regional and for their team feature, both in August.

Final Results:

1 Will Leonard
2 Aparna Paul
3 Bobby Crawford
4 Jarvis Subia
5 Mugs Myers

6 Kai Wallin
7 Logan Lopez
8 Edie Churchill

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, please join us in remembering Ron Goba, the esteemed former doorman for the Boston Poetry Slam (BPS), mostly at the Cantab Lounge, who died in January of 2026. Several of Ron’s friends and fellow poets will offer tributes including Prabakar Thyagarajan, Chad Parenteau, Nate Connors, Jenny Oliensis, Michael F. Gill, Victoria Bosch Murray, and Tom Daley. Friends and admirers of Ron are encouraged to read a poem by him or for him or say a few words on the open mike.

Ron Goba served as doorman for the BPS between 1992 and 2004. In his youth, Ron was a champion basketball player. Later on he became a renowned high school English teacher. Several generations of Cantab poets experienced his amicable and encouraging presence at the door. In the words of longtime host, Michael Brown, “If Ron nodded assent, you knew you were doing well.” Ron usually closed out the open mike with his incisive, punning, disjunctive, heartfelt and cerebral poems.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, March 18th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Max, Lou, and Will S started a (meta) theme as they did open mic poems about….local open mics! The Boston area is full of great ones, like Trident, Just Beloved, The Boston Liberation Center, and BPS. “These rooms save lives” – Will S

• March wrote a montage of trying to exist in public (“the clouds are grateful they don’t have to cross the street”) and Bob S gave us a piece on his time working in a Philly hospital during the AIDS crisis.

• “I have married my coping mechanisms” – Scott T

• It was beloved regular Kaitie D’s last time on the mic for awhile as they move to New York! Despite their protestations that “America killed this poem”, the audience was super engaged with it and savored the ability to witness Kaitie’s bold words and raw performance one more time!

• This week we had the return of the HAIKU SLAM! 8 brave poets, some of whom were convinced to sign up minutes before we started, went to battle with each other, including our feature, Warren Longmire, who made it to the final round! Open mic-er Sahfa was crowned the winner with a set of haiku both charming, hopeful, and…written at the last second!

• We had a great smoking section featuring Aparna (“Happy anniversary to the screws that held me together after I broke my leg,”) Amy (“My mother calls me honey, and I will call my daughter honey” / “In our family pain is our strongest tradition,”) and Myles (“I put on a podcast to feel safe with my thoughts”)

Feature

Warren Longmire was our feature this week, and after signing up impromptu for our haiku slam, he opened with an unplanned poem suite of 20 haiku! Warren was extremely efficient with his time, showed a wide range of versatility, and had incredible performance chops, stage presence, and banter! After his haiku set, we got a “sex poem for the end of the universe”, and then a deeply surreal journey into engineering that started with the phrase “You ask me for a hamburger,” and proceeded to go through a myriad of responses/scenarios that all seemed to exist in different universes. Then we went into an anti-war piece written on the eve of the Gulf War, and a homage to Jazz great Dizzy Gilespie’s ability to maintain a great sense of joy even at the end of his life. Thank you Warren!

Coming Up This Wednesday

It’s the biggest night of the year, TEAM SELECTION FINALS! Get here early as the top 8 slammers will fight to be on the 2026 Boston Poetry Slam Team! Our open mic will be a little shortened, and the slam will start around 9:30 PM. Admission will be $6 (instead of $4), with extra funds going toward our team’s travel costs.

Competing tonight:
– Aparna Paul
– Will Leonard
– Mugs Myers
– Bobby Crawford
– Logan Lopez
– Jarvis Subia
– Edie Churchill
– Kai Wallin

If you haven’t already subscribed, check out the *latest version of our newsletter*, which includes additional info about our four-year reopening anniversary (also happening tonight!) and info on volunteering at BPS and the upcoming Northbeast Regional Poetry Slam!

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, March 11th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Shout out to the large group of newcomers who signed up early on the mic this week, including 2nd-timer Shy and Sydney from West Tennessee, and Alyna from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• Some unexpected onomatopoeia, whispering, singing, and other dynamic “Freak shit” (© Myles Taylor) from Julian

• “I’d like to go home but I don’t think it’s there anymore” – Emma on transitioning and outgrowing their family

• “Peeled grapes for eyeballs” – Nick Roberts

• Elizabeth’s poem “Loving you on the first 60 degree day of the year,” which the whole audience resonated with (it was briefly 70 degrees on Tuesday but went back down to 30-40 degrees by Thursday and Friday)

• “I count the days since I’ve mourned my innocence” / “What is falling if not waiting to be caught” – Kaitie D

• Bobby’s magical realism poem about meeting your partner’s parents who live many light years away, and newcomer Emily fitting right at home with a poem about “the moon, rage, and feminine trauma”

• First-timer Delaney’s poem “Women Begrudgingly in STEM,” which had an incredibly inventive list of dream professions that they would like to try out instead of being a protein chemist

• Myles’ “In therapy at the end of the world” which urged for the present to be referred to as a time of fascism instead of labeling it as “uncertain times”

Feature

We had the second preliminary slam of the 2026 team selection this week! 8 more of this year’s top slammers faced off head-to-head, with a space in the finals reserved for the top 4 scorers! See below for my raw notes on each poem during this incredible slam!

Round 1

• Ember: “We are the river folk living in the current of time” / “We held hands for 48 raindrops” / “I took that stone you saved and hid its magic in poems” / 24.0

• Jarvis: The patron saint of Mexico visits Trump’s White House / “Threads of moonlight lift her” / Cartography lines and borders are imaginary / The White House is “a patch of urine frothing at the scalp” 27.9

• Aparna: “Man lies / Wait let me start over” / “Man applies for green card / Man is denied” / “A tiger chased me up a banana tree and I forgot to be afraid” / “I eat my history” / 29.2

• Kelsey: “We have to talk about the movie Rosemary’s Baby” / “Physicians’ puppeteer my body” / “A cycle of violence is a plot point” / “Body autonomy is met with fear tactics” / “How much hell can a holy body hold?” / 26.4

• Mugs: To my 3-year-old daughter / “You hate sauce but have a joy that adults don’t have access to” / “If you are queer you will be 3rd generation queer” / “We named you after the history of pride month” / “I will wait for you at the corner of hope and action” / 26.9

• Mary: “She is a poorly written character” / “She doesn’t pass the Bechdel test” / “Maybe she was abused” / “The writers aren’t helping us here” / “She is annoying” / “A washed up carbon copy of all the characters she was before” / “You have to give it to the actor” / “She looks at the screen and asks the viewer what to do” / 26.3

• Winston: Poem framed as a PBS infomercial / “The tv show Arthur taught me more about being a human than Jesus ever did” / “We here at PBS will accept anything / your car, your blood, your fleeting glances” / “I grew up on PBS, you wouldn’t take that away from me, right?” / Incorporates audience members in the poem / The audience seems to enjoy leftfield humor more than the judges / 25.6

• Logan: “My aunt asks everyone in the room, have you ever contemplated suicide? / I wonder how she knows my answer” / “I was given this body and it’s trying to kill me” / 27.6

Round 2

• Jarvis: “I want to be a fortune giver” / “I want all scales to malfunction and say we are beautiful” / “And we are all wailing a joyous song” / “And the puddle dries itself before you step in it” 27.2

• Mugs: Waking up to find your partner’s soul has escaped overnight / “The limp damp cold of our bed” / “I will always keep growing our love one day at a time” / 28.5

• Kelsey: “The first truth I learned about my body I will never write about” / The fear of giving birth / The rights of a pregnant women / The right to having an abortion / “As if I could CBT myself outside of fascism” / Very raw / 27.7

• Logan: Moving day / The bonds of queer friendship when you live together / “Filthy” / Caring about queer safety, joy, and laughter more than cleanliness / 27.7

• Aparna: “My father and I have different swear words” / “Our fates are as fluid as we are” / “All stories are about lying” / “This language helps us heal even if it’s a lie” / 29.2

• Mary: “I am a rational logical person / I don’t create my reality” / “I have a stupid poet’s heart and I don’t know how to make it stop” / “I don’t hear my voice calling me from the inside every day / I am a rational logic person / I just wish I didn’t want” / “I am a child fighting monsters no one can see” 28.5

• Winston: “I was abducted by aliens in Taunton, MA and here is my report” / “The alien meets me in the form of Ronald Reagan” / “What do you hold sacred? / Watching glittering gods peek back at me from the window” / “The universe digested itself” / “Tune yourself into the cosmic background radiation / It sounds like a heartbeat” / 27.2

• Ember: “The fracture point of a conversation” / The cracks / “Scrubbing what can’t be removed” / “Darkness quivering tectonic” / “I am the shattered mirror of my own choices” / “One day I’ll take my first steps in a world we’ve broken together” / 29.0

Final Scores

1st Aparna Paul 58.4
2nd Mugs Myers 55.4
3rd Logan Lopez 55.3
4th Jarvis Subia 55.1

5th Mary S 54.8
6th Kelsey Kessler 54.1
7th Ember Bricault 53.0
8th Winston Liao 52.8

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have a feature from Philly’s Warren Longmire as well as our normal extended open mic!

Warren C. Longmire is a Black poet, performer, and technologist from North Philadelphia. His poetry and hybrid media work investigate race, surveillance, grief and hope through generative literature, interactive design, and live performance. His poems have appeared in Cartridge Lit, Action, Spectacle, The American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry 202, with recent digital poetry featured by Taper, The Offing and the New Media Caucus. He is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, March 4th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Bailey and Artemis led off the open mic with love poems to each other, warming everyone’s hearts and inciting the ire of our apparently anti-love host Myles Taylor (full disclosure: they met before coming to the Cantab)

• “My sister’s pain is empty eggshells” – Edie writing into Amy’s “Locket” poem

• Abe’s “This Stream of Conscious Isn’t Over” and the surprising appearance of a demiquaver in Nick Roberts’ poem

• Kaitie D’s “Patient History” poem, part of a lineage of BPS poems written after visiting an OB/GYN (“Every question I answer is an iceberg”)

• “After weeks of rain I returned to the persimmon tree” – first-timer Remo

• Normally a group piece contrapuntal (by Jade, Edie, and Abe) would be a stand-out piece at an open mic, but here at BPS, contrapuntals are just the NORM, and EXPECTED. Thanks Jade!

• “Have you seen a thing rising from the east? It’s a thing called hope” – Sahfa’s haiku

• Bobby’s color translation poem about how different languages see and think about color, and why goldfish in French translates to “Red Fish”

• Briana’s sexy piece, “Jazz bit your lip from sunset”

• Kai and yours truly did a found poem / group piece reading all the messages Kaitie D has sent us on venmo the past couple of years

• “My inner child has never stopped working” / “I’m good at school because I’m good at answering my questions” – Amy

Feature

Michael Lee graced the stage this week with many friends and fans in the audience! While he did treat us to an older memorized slam piece about addiction and some poems from his 2019 book The Only Worlds We Know, things really kicked into gear for both audience and poet when he started reading some fiery new work, including his experience at the 2020 Minneapolis uprising, and current-day violence in Minnesota. Two litanies stuck out with their repetition and their power, one revolving around the phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword” and the other based of the line “What kind of god should we ask to stop all this”. Other memorable bits: “I’ve been wanting to see this police station burn and now I’m finally seeing it”, “If you don’t like [sobriety] after 6 months, you can have all your pain and misery back”, “Dust is grief in its final form”. Thanks Michael!

Coming Up This Wednesday

OUR NEXT TEAM SELECTION PRELIM IS HERE! The second half of our qualified poet pool will be battling for placement in Team Selection Finals. Top four poets move on! The open mic will be shortened again to accommodate the longer show, so please get here early!

This prelim will feature the following poets:
Mary S
Logan Lopez
Winston Liao
Jarvis Subia
Kelsey Kessler
Mugs Myers
Aparna Paul
Ember Bricault

See you there!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, February 25th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Eri’s “If I had to f*%k one of the four horseman…”

• Bailey’s fourth-wall breaking poem including lines like “Whatever happens between us we need to still be able to go to the poetry show”

• Noel’s pastorally lush and lyrical ode to a specific tree in Cambridge (calling all arborists!)

• TJ Jones’ persona piece as coal train worker “Jerry Coltraine” that reminded me of Cameron’s prank persona pieces from the last couple years

• Kyle M’s “In Defense of Wicked” after former BPS regular Brandon Melendez’s “In Defense of Hella”

• “Everything that leaves me still has a room in me” – Alia returning to the mic with a poem in Greek (followed by an English translation)

• Ed W’s devastating poem about mothers, suicide, and the choice to raise children against all odds

• A solid smoking section which featured the return of Briana, Zeke, and Aparna (post-injury) to the mic

Feature

2026 Team selection is upon us! 8 of this year’s top slammers faced of head-to-head the first of two preliminary slams, with a space in the finals reserved for the top 4 scorers! Despite some first-round score creep, and a rough draw for some poets, we had an incredible slam! See below my unedited notes on each poem that I live-texted to Kat Anderson while it was happening!

Round 1

• Isaiah: Bees, their father’s paintings and chemotherapy 26.5
• Kai: “My father and I, we conjure inconvenience” 26.8
• Edie: “God nearly chains me” / their involvement in Boston priest sex scandal 27.4
• Will: “Attachment theory says…” / “The day my bones unravels into vines” / 28.2
• Brynna: “This is my (black) girl poem” (after Tru Kwene) / uplifting their black students / “Doesn’t this poem just jump off the page” 28.6
• Kaitie D: “I think I’ve been preparing for grief my whole life” / “My mother and I were supposed to share the same birthday / My abuelo and I do” / Lots of birthday cake imagery and the specter of death 26.1
• Bobby: Accidentally gets the neighbor’s mail and hears them through the walls / worries about them and cares about their lives so much / 27.6

Round 2

• Kaitie D: “Content warning for wack shit dads say” / stunning doctors in silence with their questions about depression and suicides / “Do you want to die or kill the part that’s hurting you?” 27.3
• Kai: “My cat has separation anxiety” / their family getting no inkling of love from their dad / there was love here once / can’t leave right before the breakthrough right? 27.3
• Bobby: Persona poem in the voice of a stewardess who was on the plane during the DB Cooper hijacking / 27.5
• Amy: “My pain is shaped like a locket” / “I forget I’m a daughter” / “I gave my pain to my mom on Tuesday and she gave it back to me” 27.1
• Edie: Bawsten accent / Changing it to fit in / Finding new words to wrap around / Self exploration / “You can never survive if you keep it in like that, kid” / “I just want to return to myself” / “I want to sound like home” 26.8
• Brynna: Plantation goes up in flames / “they say they host murder mystery parties there” / “that poem writes itself” / “my blood is at the scene” / they have weddings there / trading vows over a mass grave / 28.8
• Will: “I keep having this dream that I wake up with a penis” / “I don’t know what it’s like to be choked / just chewed” / “The only dream I have I am already living” 28.3
• Isaiah: “If I had a nickel for every time I was called a good Jew” / deep dive into anti-semitism and the people behind the ads against anti semitism / their involvement in Jewish pro-Palestine protests / 27.5

Final Scores

1st Brynna Boyd 57.4
2nd Will Leonard 56.5
3rd Bobby Crawford 55.1
4th Edie Churchill 54.2

5th Kai Wallin 54.1
6th Isaiah Newman 54.0
7th Kaitie Dilan 53.4
8th Amy Argentar 53.1

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have a feature from travelling poet Michael Lee (of Button Poetry fame) and an early-bird workshop by Maria Pinto entitled “You’re a Natural(ist)!” Workshop at 6:30 pm, doors at 7:15, open mic at 8, feature at 10 pm.

Workshop Description: Nature isn’t something you have to travel outside the city to find: our relationships with our neighbors count as nature, the urban paths where our dogs chase pigeons count, too. Franklin Park, the Boston Nature Center, and Stonybrook Reservation are just a few of the green spaces the city has to offer. Boston is teeming with natural beauty and splendor to which we might write odes and even protect with the written word. Maria Pinto will read passages from her own nonfiction book, then participants in this workshop will write to prompts designed to help them look closely at Boston’s natural abundance.

Feature Bio: Michael Lee Vikre is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. Author of The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019), he has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar and the Arthur Lynn Andrews Award for Fiction from Cornell University, Michael’s writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and Best New Poets among others. Holding an Ed.M in Arts Education from Harvard University and an MFA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Cornell University, Michael teaches in and coordinates the TREC Prison Education Program at Metro State University which offers a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies for incarcerated students in Minnesota. He lives on the Northside of Minneapolis.

See you!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, February 18th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• It was a great night for newcomers, with the first 6 people on the mic reading for first or second time!

• “It’s a miracle to me to speak into the dawn / ponder away a broken heart” – Christina

• Sahfa’s repeated their poem “I have trying to leave my boyfriend for 1.8 years” from last year, having now actually left said boyfriend in question!

• Edie with an advertisement-disguised-as-a-poem for their new podcast Ridiculous Research Review

• River’s “Fare Evasion as Love Language” (which prompted yours truly to write a response haiku, “Fare Compliance as love language”

• Anna’s “A Stint in Jupiter’s Collapsing Polycule” and Emma’s “Retaliatory Heart Emojis”

• First timer Rori prefaced their poem by saying it was a draft and not that good, and then, in true Cantab fashion, went on to deliver perhaps the most funny, heartquaking, and devastating poem and performance on the open mic this year! I could quote lines from it, about being an Olympian at holding in your pee, being the best at breakups, and not being able to express who you truly are and saying you are ok with it despite actually aching yourself apart, but it wouldn’t do it justice. A truly WOW moment that came out of nowhere for us to experience together. Thank you Rory!

Feature

This week we had the last chance slam!! We had 8 slammers fight for the final two slots in the 2026 Team Selection Qualifiers. We had plenty of first-time BPS slammers and a ton of new work to go around which made the night extra sweet. Jocelyn and Jess really impressed, the former with a pair of what I’d call “sensual breakup poems” (containing an equal amount of references to body heat as disappointment) and a latter with a short raw work about the experience of going to anti-ICE protests and defending yourself in a current of anti-immigration sentiment. Our final pair came down to Ember, whose poems (“Leaving my ex’s daughter”, “Explaining distance to my mother”, “When the cancer wins”) lead with gravitas and resilience, and Winston, who read three reinventions of “found poems” involving “National Treasure 3”, his own medical charts, and the death of a young child that really turned the form on its head and left the audience completely disarmed. In the end, Ember was the winner tonight, but the real winners were the audience who stuck it out late to hear so much great new work!

Coming Up This Wednesday

TEAM SELECTION IS UPON US! For this week’s featured event, 8 out of the 16 challengers for this year’s team will be facing off. The top 4 poets move on to Team Selection Finals on March 25th! Open mic will be shortened to make up for the longer slam, so get there early!

Come support the following poets this Wednesday:
Edie Churchill
Will Leonard
Amy Argentar
Brynna Boyd
Kaitie D
Isaiah Newman
Bobby Crawford
Winston Liao

See you there!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, February 4th & February 11th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

02/04/26

• Bobby’s C riffed on gatekeepers and Harold Bloom’s out-of-touch remark that “Poetry slam is the death of art”

• Emmanuel’s “Standing in front of a mirror trying to know what love is”

• Nick Roberts’ “My Curated Pandemonium” and “Lament Of The Finnish Bird Seller”

• Jake M’s unforgettable “The tribulations of a straight man turned into a gay horse” had the audience both squirming and laughing in their seats! Kudos to Jake for reading it completely seriously, despite plenty of horse puns and ridiculous horse-sexual inuendoes

• Stevie Subrizi riffed on The Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket” and Jade Kleiner returned to the mic with “T for T at the end of the world”

• “I have strong feelings about fictional men but none about real men” – Kai Wallin

02/11/26

• Lots of new faces on the mic this week, welcome to Norah, Alfred, Emma, and Amelia!

• And also welcome back to the mic Maya, (non-Worcester) Ember, and the legend himself, Rudolf, our resident Austrian who brings us translations of German poems, and may threaten to read the second half of those translations….seven years later!

• Rachel’s poem dialogue with “Person X” and River’s poem about being gay engaged

Feature

On 02/04 we were held by the gentle gravity by Jr Mahung, who featured for us! Jr writes a lot about being from Belize and what it means to be a Garifuna poet, and we heard poems about Belizean-American basketball player Milt Palacio, and poem-essays describes Jr’s relationship to colonialism. We also heard work about JR’s experience living in trans collective housing, and the feelings that arose from being sober in today’s world. Other highlights include the poems “Tell Me How To Float Away From My Body & Head Towards Desire” and “In Which All My Crushes & I Hang Out: A Composite Of Desire”. Thank you JR!

On 02/11 we had an impromptu Love vs Death slam in honor of Valentine’s day. Team Love (captained by Kai Wallin) soundly defeated Team Death (captained by Zeke Russell) this year, which gives you an inkling to what the audience wanted to hear tonight (not death, for once!).

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week it’s the last chance open poetry slam! This is your final chance to qualify for the 2026 Boston Poetry Slam Team Selection Slams, which are right around the corner! You will need three poems under three minutes to compete. The top 2 will qualify for Team Selection, with the winner getting $75!

See you soon!

– MFG 🚪

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Info On Tonight’s Show (February 11th, 2026)

  • Filed under big news

  • February 11, 2026

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While we are all sad that Hanif Abdurraquib’s planned feature tonight has been postponed, we are replacing that sadness with love and happiness by announcing an impromptu LOVE VS DEATH SLAM!

At the door, you can sign up to be on TEAM LOVE or TEAM DEATH: it’s a head-to-head team slam where either team love or team death will emerge victorious in the end. If you’d like to sign up, choose your favorite love- or death-related pieces and be prepared to SLAM against the opposing team.

THAT’S NOT ALL! During the open mic, we are also doing VALENTINE’S DAY BINGO! We will pass out bingo sheets to audience members that have several (potentially unhinged) v-day themes that may come up during the open mic.

NOTE FOR 2/11: There will be a PRIVATE EVENT in the UPSTAIRS LOUNGE from 5:30-7:30, so unfortunately poets will not be able to wait upstairs before the show. We are opening doors to the basement EARLY, at 7 pm, to allow folks to settle in and get out of the cold, but if you arrive earlier than that, please dress according to the weather and be ready to wait in a line outside prior to the show. Poets will be able to wait in the upstairs bar starting after 7:30 if the show sells out before then. Thank you for understanding!

See you tonight!

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, January 21th & January 28th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

01/21/26

• Tyrone’s short and wild ode to flying toilet paper that took a lot of detours within one minuted

• Apologies to Artemis if this does not describe their poem appropriately, but I have written down “gay sex set to the sound of protests” in my notes about their work

• Lyn’s love letter to Voyager I, and anti-love letter to large language models (“You got out just in time, Voyager”)

• Isaiah’s written-during-the-open-mic poem about the three wolves inside you: the f**k wolf, the marry wolf, and the kill wolf.

• “I confuse time for pain” – Aparna

• Shenanigans arose when the name “Enigma” was called up to the open mic and mysteriously didn’t show up….until 5 or 6 poets later when they suddenly appeared to read! A very apt moniker.

01/28/26

• River’s nostalgia filled poem about swimming in their home lake, and how they trained to swim all seven miles of it

• “I have been replaced by the harmony of dawn” – Charlie R

• First timer Rachael C’s excellent Tea Party poem, which breathed new life and fresh ideas into a popular consent metaphor

• Edie’s response to the ICE shootings in Minneapolis (“Fascist stormtroopers” / “Carnage is our bigest domestic product”) and Kaitie D’s “Home is where the bodies are buried”

• First timer Jimmy’s “Having a snow with you” that made living somewhere with a horrible windchill sound practically romantic

• Bobby Crawfrod’s “The New Me” – “There were parts of me that died before but this was the first time I had to kill it myself”

• Myles’ “Scrolling through 224 video squares during the ICE information aoom call”

• I don’t usually comment on what I (Michael F Gill) do on the open mic, but this week I spoke in remembrance of Ron Goba, the original BPS doorperson, who died this past at the age of 89. We will be having a Ron Goba tribute night this coming April!

Feature

On January 21st, we had a feature from Ally Ang! It was a sort of homecoming in that Ally read their first poem on stage at the Cantab many years ago. Ally read us a ton of poems with very little banter slow them down, so we got to hear work from both new and old manuscripts. Highlights include “A vegetarian goes to H Mart (to finger meats)”, “More Americans think they’ve seen a ghost than a trans person”, and a couple of amazing litanies (one where each line begun with “Trans day of ______”). There was also new work that skillfully tied in those annoying “Click here to verify you are human” CAPTCHAS with the idea of feeling noticed and seen in the world. Thank you Ally!

This past Wednesday on January 28th we had an open poetry slam! It was a shorter 6 person affair, but that didn’t stop our finalists Edie and Amy from delivering incredible and polished work! Shoutout to Durane West for kicking off a section of poems revolving around Boston history and lore, as Will S and Edie followed up with Boston poems of their own. At the end of the night, Amy was the winner and took home $75. There’s only one open slam left before our big 2026 team selection slams!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we have a feature from local and Cantab/BPS favorite JR Mahung and an early bird workshop by Stevie Subrizi! Workshop at 6:30, doors at 7:15, show starts at 8:00, and feature goes on at 10.

JR Mahung (She/They) is a Garifuna poet from Chicago. She now lives in Boston, MA with her cat, Frank Ocean.

Stevie Subrizi’s “One Prolonged Un-Understanding” workshop info:

What separates prose poems from micro-fiction, flash memoir, and other shortform literary prose? For that matter, what—besides a lack of line breaks—separates them from other poems? Here’s one answer: perhaps, to quote Dean Young’s poem “Lives of the Mind” on the topic of art itself, a prose poem is uniquely suited to serve as “one prolonged un-understanding / just as dawn is day’s un-understanding of the night.” From news articles to work emails, product descriptions to history books, prose delivers so much of our “understood” reality. Looking at prose poems by Victoria Chang, Eve Ewing, and Zachary Schomburg, we will un-understand our real-life subjects by pulling them into the dreamlike realm of poem-logic while using the familiar frame of the workaday paragraph, forming a mirror-universe portrait that can reveal more about our world than may be seen through a literal, realist lens.

See you soon!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, January 14th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Mary’s Heated Rivalry poem and “I have no one I can give my power to who can also protect it”

• Jennifer’s “Confession of An Emotional Intelligent Avoidant” (great title / relatable!)

• Ember wasn’t supposed to be in town but got to say goodbye for a record third time (lucky for us!) and Bailey gave us a fiery new piece after poet Richard Siken, involving an “autism-friendly desert fork”

• Kaitie D’s “Eulogy to The Daughters” (after Ben Tolkin) that sprung from a litany beginning with “I have a daughter in ______”

• Abbie’s ouroboros farewell poem as they return to Ireland, and Carson’s “Queer Inquiry To Friendship In Movies”

• An incredible staff/smoking section that had Aparna’s moving piece about a Cambridge meeting discussing a police murder, Amy’s “All poets need a poem titled ‘Inheritance'” after Catherine Weiss, Kai’s dive into romance novels, and Myles’ absolutely iconic “Defend Allston (from ICE)” poem that showcases the neighborhood in all of its glory.

Feature

We had an open qualifying poetry slam this week! First-time slammers Abigail and Winston both made it to 2nd round with solid work: Abby detailing the last words of a relationship, and Winston responding to Aparna’s classic “I Imagine My Mother On Her Deathbed And”. Our final two was a surprise–Keaton signed up on a whim but delivered strong work on their drag name (“Male Hysteria”), late night ChatGPT conversations, and their well-known poem about a Boston redditor looking for people to compete with. Even more of a surprise was getting to hear three poems from no-longer-in-Boston-but-still-in-New England Bobby Crawford, who read the humorous “The Summer All The Girlfriends Disappeared”, a solitary tale of how “The Internet Works But Maybe It Shouldn’t”, and a nearly 4 minute epic about continuing to work at the same bar where one of their late co-workers used to work, and keeping up their traditions and recipes. Keaton was the winner of the slam, but a great time was had by all!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we have a feature from across the country: Ally Ang!

Bio: Ally Ang is a gaysian poet & editor based in Seattle, WA. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, Muzzle Magazine, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Ang is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and MacDowell fellow. Their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, is now out from Alice James Books. Find them at allysonang.com or on Twitter and Instagram @TheOceanIsGay.

See you soon!

– MFG 🚪

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