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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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