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Open Mic Highlights
• Somaia’s didactic poem on how to do fire eating at the Dyke March
• We got a farewell poem from open-mic regular and haiku finalist Siraj Ali, soon-to-be leaving us for Michigan. Siraj’s wry humor and quietly affecting miniature poems will be missed!
• Kaitie D’s time-traveling piece that warped around from a 2018 uber ride to a frozen-in-time version of Trivial Pursuit from 1981
• Lauren’s “A Summer’s Worth of Therapy in under 3 minutes” and Jacqui’s poem that “asked wrinkles if they want to stay”
• The manifesto of the newly named Roxy Martinez-Dobbs (fka as Eddy), returning to the mic after an entrepreneurial absence
• A surprise return and hosting turn by former staff member Kat Anderson, who drove in from NY just to see our feature
• After the open mic, we had our haiku slam! There was some fun messing with the form tonight, with TJ Jones really extending his intro with a long-crashing wave of silence, and Shawn seeing how long he could draw out the title of his haiku before getting shooed off stage (we let him go on for like 30 seconds, maybe we’ll get the full version some other time!) In the final round, two-time defending haiku champion Aparna Paul and Skylar Pape had an equal amount of applause after two votes, with Skylar deferring the win to Aparna in the end.
Feature
Staff member and long-time open mic and slam favorite Briana Crockett was our feature tonight, celebrating the release of their new book, A Body of Want: A Galaxy of Other Trinkets, out on Game Over Books. It was a captivating performance, be sure to watch it again on our instagram feed if you weren’t there! Opening up with asking the entire audience to stand up, stretch, and hug themselves, Briana then settled into a set of well-crafted extended poems that touched on autonomy, the body, remediation, how “the revolution belongs to the soft touch of your sister”, and stories of growing up in Boston’s schools and churches. The most beautiful moment came during a poem dedicated to her high school bully Nicholas, who later became a victim of gun violence. Briana’s compassionate and empathic urge to “write him a different destiny” had a good deal of the audience moved to tears. Thank you, Briana, for sharing your work and being a part of this community!
Coming Up This Wednesday
This week’s feature is a “Patricia Smith-approved” poet, Tim Stafford, on tour from Chicago!
Bio: Tim Stafford is a poet and educator from Lyons, IL. A former Chicago Poetry Slam Champion, his work has appeared in The Offing, 68 to 05, Taco Bell Quarterly, and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam. He has appeared at poetry festivals across the U.S. and Europe, including the ABC Brecht Festival (Germany), the Zurich Poetry Slam Invitational (Switzerland), and the International Spoken Word Festival (Denmark/Germany). He is the editor of the all-ages spoken word anthology series “Learn Then Burn”, as well as the author of the poetry collections “The Patron Saint of Making Curfew” (Haymarket Books, 2021) and “Broke Stay Broke” (Write Bloody Books, 2025). He is a Poetry Foundation Incubator Fellow and the winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Poetry Prize.
See you soon,
– MFG 🚪
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