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Open Mic Highlights
• It was a night of quotable lines!
• “I’ve been answering the phone [for/as] my mother since I was ten years old” – Farah
• “I pooped over a colander for a month” – from Jayda’s poem about accidentally swallowing a coin when they were 11 (they never found the coin!)
• “I am a hanging bag of other bags” – previous Cantab featured poet Jess Yuan
• “Waiting for the opportunity…like astronauts waiting to go to space” – Sam Bucci’s reflection after reading the obituary of an ex, and the hopes they had for the future ascent of their relationship
• “Don’t terminate Tim.exe / www.themassiveholeinmyheart.com” – Tim G
• “The funeral home / where as a kid I’d test out every coffin / just to see which ones were most comfortable / but now I know that it’s the living who need comfort most” – Will S
• “I’ll never write a poem that I’m not in” – Myles Taylor
• “Be in your butt” – also Myles Taylor, hosting, telling people they need to be back in their seats for the feature
• And finally, a shout out to TJ Jones for doing a poem in this recapper’s (Michael F Gill) voice! It is great how we can all reflect each other so well in this community <3
Feature
leena aboutaleb was our feature this week! leena read almost entirely from their debut collection, THALASSA, a “love song of misery and grief” that follows the poet’s journeying into the underworld to further understand the death of her brother, and the insistent mourning that has followed from it. Despite the heavy subject manner (including some poems that have never been read out loud before) this was a set of vibrant, urgent poems that had me scrambling to keep up as I wrote down line after line in my notebook. Some of those lines include: “Your body is gone and I am begging,” “I wake up in your grave on my luckiest days,” “My beauty a blade I sharpen in silence,” “I am patient for devastation to peel my skin back,” “Let me kiss the fear / what is stolen can’t be said,” “I want to unravel my ghosts, do their laundry, and make them sweet tea,” and the poem “New World Order At The Centre Of My Love,” which contains the line: “Once a year, I slice my palm open and refill the city; the lights go on and off for a moment then the electricity whizzes right back on.” What else needs to be said? Thank you so much leena.
– MFG 🚪
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