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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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