BPS Recap For Wednesday, July 8th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Emma’s wild and ragged “Forced Femme Uncle Sam” which is just what you think it was about, and appropriate for July 4th…

• “We stood there waiting for someone to make the next move” – Gel’s description/conundrum about continuing to be in love / in a long-term relationship

• “The afterlife might be full of regrets” / “Does the afterlife have privacy settings?” – Sue Savoy

• Philip G’s entertaining “Boy with spaghetti noodles for arms” and TJ’s response poem to Abbie and Shivank that was a conversation between so many wolves!

• Jarvis’ “Poem in which I F&%* Mitch Mcconnell” and a surprise group piece from Amy & Kelsey involving photo sessions, beauty standards, and the commentary around it.

• “This poem is either called ‘Not Your AI Girlfriend’ or ‘Too Wet To Be AI'” – Lynette

• “I am trying to dig a hole deep enough to never see the bottom; I am building a wormhole to spagettify existence” / “My social anxiety asks me to leave the room, but everywhere is a room” – March Penn

• Brynna’s “cookie cutter” found poem where each line was written by one of their students, and a tantalizing excerpt from Briana’s long poetic narrative on sex and sorrow

Feature

Our feature was the return of the BOX OF DOOM Slam! 8 brave and unsuspecting poets reached into the box to reveal what nefarious/hilarious piece of writing our community members dropped inside! There were so many shenanigans!

Host Brynna opened things up by reading a dramatic post by a Japanese man who visited a Mexican restaurant and couldn’t believe the chips and salsa that he filled up on were free (“Honor demanded they be finished / I have been defeated by generosity”). Shawn had to perform “10 Common Lovemaking Mistakes” (#1 – Standing On The Bed), and Isaiah amped up “Things I Would Do If I Had a Penis”. Abbie read posts about the most boring car ever (the 1999 Toyota Corolla) and about the person who may have engineered the world’s worst burrito. Old friend Cam S was back in town for one week, and smoothly related a tale about someone accidentally “killing” a dummy during CPR training class.

The top performances of the night belonged to Jayda and Em Roth, who managed to elevate their material in ways the source material may not have actually deserved! Em Roth (our overall winner) somehow poured a lot of straight up *emotion* into Spongebob’s “I am a goofy goober”, as well as an internet post complaining about “poop in my fingernails”. Jayda may have been dealt the most awkward hand, having to perform “Think U The Shit (Fart)” by Ice Spice, Cardi B’s “WAP”, and “The Diarrhea Bounce Back” by The Toilet Bowl Cleaners. But Jayda performed them all straight-faced, with a strong sense of gravitas and perfect diction! An incredible feat that this recapper will not soon forget. Thanks to all who performed and those who stuck around to watch it all go down!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have our normal extended open mic and an open poetry slam! If you have 3 poems that are 3 minutes or less, you can compete for the chance to win $75! The top 2 slammers will also qualify for the 2027 Boston Poetry Slam team selection.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, July 1st, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Ave Maria opened the mic off with a memorized and well-crafted piece about honey, despair, and pulling oneself back from the ledge

• River’s ode to bathroom graffiti and the unhinged “conversations” that happen on stalls (PS the Cantab bathroom graffiti is great!)

• What I have written down for Nick Roberts poem is “The nymph in the damp glasses is stagnant but on the side of profane love”

• Normally an out of context line like “OCD? You can OCDeez Nuts” could indicate a problematic poem, but Jesse pulled it off and had the crowd and host Myles laughing by the end!

• Iris’ masked jabberwocky-esque poem, and Abbie’s piece after Shivank “Two Wolves” poem, imploring “Just one wolf please, I’m not greedy”

• John Lee’s moving farewell to Boston poem that involved both Boston and Celtics loyalty, even as the Jaylen Brown trade was announced, and showed how emotionally (and perhaps irrationally) invested he is in the team and city. We’ll miss you John!

• Kat Gunther on both the kindness and anger of random strangers while traveling by foot or bike

• Kai with a devastating poem about a Father’s Day gift that made them reflect on their own troubled relationship with their dad, and how others have learned to be kind from their father

Feature

Scott Beal was our feature this week! A poet with an incredibly soothing voice and whose (memorized) work flowed out like conversations with a kind of lyrical hypnotism, Scott read both new and work during his well-crafted set. Highlights include “Love Poem That Becomes the Wikipedia Entry For Ambrosia Beetle”, a piece about signing divorce papers that also invokes facts about stegosaurus, and a golden shovel using the chorus of “Toxic” by Britney Spears. There was also a touching piece about their child realizing they were gender queer, and a closing piece that entertainingly told the history of chicken soup (“I hope you catch a vicarious buzz through this poem”). Thank you Scott!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This Wednesday, as part of our community night, we are doing a Box of Doom slam! Unsuspecting poets will reach into the box and reveal their fate: will they be reading a poem, a reddit post, an overly wordy recipe, or one of the other wacky prompts the staff have inserted? There’s only one way to find out! Show up tonight and try your hand at slamming for this always-entertaining event!

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, June 17th & June 24th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights 06/17

• There was World cup fever at the beginning of the mic! The Tartan Army from Scotland was in the house, and first-timer Bryan Bonner covered Robert Burns beautifully

• David Sherman’s letter-poem to the Cantab revealing his kinks, which are “talk to me in the subjunctive mood,” and items of obsolescence like working phone booths and communicating via handwritten letters

• Claudia Wilson returned to the mic for the first time in about eight years to read an excellent epic poem about the aftermath of their hair (“at the bottom of the ocean is the remnants of my hair”)

• “My love language is driving you to the airport” / “Some friendships deserve to survive capitalism” – John Lee

• “I had the dog in me and then the dog ate the poem I was going to show you” – Shivank

• Jarvis had a memorable turn hosting, giving the audience a series of “daddy jokes” (we don’t call them dad jokes anymore) and later reprised his great “Macho Man Randy Savage” persona piece

• Renee’s poem that invoke a whole slew of philosophers to help her understand the nature of relationships

• Our haiku slam was won by Slam Free or Die’s Christopher Clauss, who made the audience laugh for extended periods of time between each haiku!

• “Hope has been lynched here and made a flag” – from Briana’s incredible piece on the violent legacy of southern states and U.S. black history

Feature 06/17

We had a TREAT of a feature this week! Local poets Will Leonard and Tru Kwene, 2026 slam champions of BPS and Just Be(Loved), combined forces to craft a full set together! The set was threaded around both the struggle and the joy of being queer or trans, but with a sense of openness that each poet was gifting each poem to you directly. The meta-titles of each poem reflected this throughout the set: Kwene’s “Here is my queer poem,” followed by Will’s “Here is my trans poem”, followed by a group piece that merges both of their voices. I urge you check out the video of the set on our instagram right now! We are so lucky to have both Will and Kwene in our local community!

Open Mic Highlights 06/24

• It was an open mic filled with group pieces from the BPS slam team! Will Leonard paired up with Mugs, Bobby, Kai, and Jarvis for a quartet of pieces that had a slower-burning, spacious, inquisitive feel, as opposed to the normal “wall-of-sound” crescendo that is often heard

• “The only script I read from is the truth” – Jayda

• Gel was on “thin ice” as he sang about RFK having a worm living in his brain to the tune of “Yesterday” by The Beatles, but it was probably the funniest poem of the night!

• It was great to see former BPS team member Skylar Paape and former BPS feature Legacy Thornton on the mic again, who both delivered standout poems about coming back to one’s self and the (non-existent) secret to happiness

• “Even our breathing held hands” – from Briana’s “Letters From Lovers Of My Body”

Feature 06/24

This week we debuted the FREAK SHIT vs THIN ICE slam! For each round, each team wrote on the same prompt, with Team Freak Shit writing in a more surrealistic and experimental way, and Team Thin Ice writing at the borders of what could be considered a poem by blending other distinct genres. Your recapper (Michael F Gill) had the pleasure of doing the sacrificial poems for both teams in the slam!

Slam highlights include Myles’ verbal concrete / “paint-by-word” piece describing Allston as he sees it, where every inch of the imagined photograph was a word describing what is there (“sky” “prudential center” “grass” “moped delivery guy”) and the poem was read from the top of the image to the bottom.

Writing on the theme of Texas, Kay told us about the difference between bigness and largeness, went deep on the science of why the air is actually heavier and thicker in Texas, and linked this density to the moment she publicly announced her relationship with her girlfriend.

TJ gave us a very funny “infomercial” for a workout app, in the style of a motivational speaker/snakeoil salesmen who also sounds like he’s 100 years old. Amy wrote about learning to play the piano, and, with the sound of a metronome playing in the background, told us how she learned to change the speed of time by playing pieces too fast or too slow, and all the mental games that come into play when you consider how many mistakes you’ll make depending on the speed in question.

There was an incredible amount of strong new work shared in this slam, with Thin Ice taking the win in the final round! Thanks to everyone who took part in this new format!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week’s featured poet Scott Beal has kindly offered to not only feature for us, but to run our monthly workshop as well! Workshop at 6:30, Doors at 7:15, Show starts at 8, feature at 10.

FEATURE INFO: Scott Beal is the author of Stegosaurus Moon (Dzanc Books, 2026) and Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014), as well as the chapbook The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in journals such as Rattle, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and have received awards including a Pushcart Prize. He directs the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts at the University of Michigan and teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing. He co-hosts the Skazat! online poetry series and co-edits the literary journal Public School Poetry. He’s performed at the Cantab Lounge, the Green Mill, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and elsewhere. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

WORKSHOP INFO: In this workshop we will examine poems by Thomas Lux and Brigit Pegeen Kelly that use humor, radically imaginative imagery, and surprising turns to complicate our understanding of abject creatures (tarantulas, scorpions). Then we will write our own poems in which we use language to explore and reach for difficult empathy for beings that inspire distrust, disgust, and fear. You’ll end up with a cool new poem, and perhaps even a more nuanced view of someone or something with whom you’ve had a difficult relationship.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, June 10th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• It was an open mic full of quotable lines!

• “Content warning: heteronormativity” – Scott Timothy

• Edie’s surprise narrative on the assassination of William Mckinley

• “I wish I had antlers–they’d stop the small talk” – Philip G

• “The magician walks in the door and asks why the sky isn’t in here and I say it is and that’s the whole fragment. ” – March Penn

• “The table is a midnight lake I can’t wrap my arms around” – Charlie R

• “If you want to swallow a lightning bolt, you need a whole weekend” – Mica (who blew away the audience with this poem!)

• Kiana’s “Pussy Innuendos”, which disarmed the audience with its unexpected metaphors and brazen discussion of sex and sexuality

• Sue Savoy re-read a 2008 poem meditating on a kind of almost unbearable positivity that she could never approach, and both Jayda and Danielle R read Pride-inspired poems about their queer awakenings/histories

Feature

We got to hear a full feature from Chiara Di Lello this week! Chiara read from both their book, Childless Millennial, as well as new work from an upcoming manuscript about their Italian-American heritage, which unpacks the stereotypes and their experience around it. A poet with a charismatic stage presence, strong banter that offered important context for each poem, and the ability to really crystallize what they wanted to say in each poem with no excess, Chiara had the audience’s attention throughout. There were a series of poems on the concept of Nulliparous (a fancy medical word ot describe a woman who hasn’t given birth to a child) and its implications (“I haven’t created”, “…haven’t begun”), as well as an insistent and intriguing poem about what the music and intervals in West Side Story say about the characters. It all went by too fast. Please come back Chiara!

Coming Up This Wednesday

You won’t want to miss this! We will have a double feature with locals Will Leonard and Tru Kwene, 2026 slam champions of BPS and Just Be(Loved), who have combined forces to craft a set together!

Bios: Will Leonard (he/they) originally from Durango Colorado, is a transmasculine writer, cat & horse dad, bartender, mug collector and the 2026 Grand Slam Champion of the Boston Poetry Slam.

Tru Kwene (she/her) is a spoken word poet from Big Boston, MA who has always been most proud of the opportunity she has to serve her community as an educator and mental health professional. Tru is also the 2026 Grand Slam Champion at Just Be(Loved) in Boston.

Inspired to write together by a deep love and respect for one another’s artistry, these two poets created a set to not only celebrate the freedom and beauty of living in their truth but to also stand firmly in clear opposition to the system of injustice that harms and claims the lives of queer people all over the globe. With a combined experience level of nearly four decades, each poet brings extensive knowledge as well as a unique style in creating a set centering survival, and all of the emotions that come with it. Tru Kwene and Will are honored to present, Poem Project: The Reckoning.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, May 27th & June 3rd, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights 05/27

• Lynette’s soup-themed sestina ruminating on how “your brain isn’t fully developed until 25”

• Aanchal’s evil dentist poem (yes, a lot of us were thinking of this as a foil to Kai’s sexy dentist poem!

• Shivank taking the well-worn “inside you there are two wolves” concept to oblivion with trademark weird wisdom and askance humor, and Alex Kist’s revelation that they learned about limerance in 5th grade

• Kay’s letter to the couscous they left out overnight and took a chance on the next day (it didn’t go well), Jayda wrote about celebrating 18 years with their spouse, and Sue Savoy read a meditation on attractiveness

• Abbie’s “audition” for the Ratatouille Musical (Ratatousical) and a surprise “We are in Hell” group piece from Kai and Will L!

• The smoking section was particularly good tonight, with Amy’s just-written bar conversation between two women who just met and discuss judgement and change, and Brynna’s “Poem In Which Kamala Harris Moves Into My Bedroom” which explained her complex relationship with her father via the US political system and some incredible lines/turns of phrase

Feature 05/27

The feature this week was our first ever COMPLIMENT DEATH MATCH! People faced off head-to-head and gave each other compliments, with the audience judging who gave the best compliment of the round! The wholesome vibes were off the charts so much that contestants admitted to feeling embarrassed on stage after receiving their round of compliments! And in between rounds, host Brynna read anonymous compliments that had been filled out by audience members about other people in the room! The winner of the compliment death match (and a free COMPLIMENTARY drink) was Kay Miranda! This was the most feel-good feature of the year <3

Open Mic Highlights 06/03

• “The only thing that would make me a man is being miserable” – first-timer Shepherd

• Sean’s audacious meta-poem where he turned away from the stage and asked people to stand up and sit down, and didn’t look to see who followed through on it / “If you have enough dreams one of them must succeed”

• The return of Charlie V and Lauren, and Scott Timothy’s Dr. Seuss inspired poem “O the place bisexual men go”

• Philip G’s tale of being on the jury for a murder trial, where the jury was instructed to ” not consider the consequences of their verdict” when making their decision

• TJ’s solemn poem on the US/Iran bombings (“They keep dropping our money through people’s heads”)

•Myles’ “During Every Job I’ve Had In Education I’ve Been Mistaken As A Student” that ruminated on image control and perception

Feature 06/03

Our feature this week was Chuck Perkins from New Orleans! If you were there for Tongo Eisen-Martin’s political-jazz-psychedelic feature in 2024, this one hit similar notes in strength, performance, and unedited extension of craft! Chuck started off-book for the first 10 minutes with a medley of poems all strung together, punctuated by recurring lines like “What else may I say about beauty”, interruptions into song, rhythm litanies, and an underlying theme of racial justice and the cycle of violence that surrounds it. Her also read from his book “Beautiful and Ugly Too”, and ended with a storytelling suite that described his upbringing with his siblings and parents, and connected it to his current life with his wife and kids. Thank you Chuck for bringing your work to us!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we will have our normal extended open mic and a feature from Chiara Di Lello!

Bio: Chiara Di Lello is a queer writer, artist, and educator who loves coffee and bees and unequivocally supports the movement for Palestinian liberation. Born and raised in New York City, she now resides in the Hudson Valley where she teaches students of many ages in creative and academic settings. Her poems and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Catapult, Okay Donkey, and Whale Road Review, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her spare time is spent trying to be a better gardener and spoiling her friends’ kids.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, May 13th & May 20th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights 05/13

• Bailey’s cover of Pigeon’s poem about adopting both a Pokémon-themed version of health insurance and a Pokémon-themed version of socialism

• Shivank added another entry in the long line of open mic poems where a horse starts talking (…but does it walk into a bar?)

• Using lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Greg & Martha enacted a conversation between Prosperity and America

• “I want to blow up a federal building….in Minecraft” – Edie

• “My heart gets me on weekends / My head has me during the week / Maybe I should stay with my lungs for a while” – Jenna on disassociating

• Kai’s moving poem to a close friend who is celebrating being in lymphoma recession for 15 years

• Early on the mic we heard a frog-themed poem by Jesse Cohen, and then at the very end we heard a dramatic (and very funny) reading by Brynna of her rap battle response poem in the voice of a frog, as part of the rap battle contest at the grade school where she teaches!

Feature 05/13

For 05/13 our feature was an open speed slam, featuring poems of 1 minute or less! We had some great work from Alex Kist and Chris Mckenna, jazzy stuff from newcomer White Swan, and Shawn showed off his (technically incredible) SPEED-reading of poems (which wowed the judges in the first round, but not so much in the second). In the end, travelling poet and DJ Mr. G won the slam over Alex and Chris with a heart-breaking poem about experimental prescription drugs that were recalled too late to save a family member.

Open Mic Highlights 05/20

• “It’s really good for my mental health for my therapist to ghost me” – Sue Savoy

• Down the wormhole with Shivank, whose poem featured an inexhaustible amount of/metaphors about….worms!

• Jen Martinez harrowing piece on domestic abuse and losing their mother slowly that absolutely shook the room (“Can you break a generational curse before it even exists?”)

• I’m not going to do justice to Scott Timothy’s poem, but it was a fast-moving stream-of-conscious fever dream through sexuality, pop culture, drugs, and existential humor that had the crowd wondering what hit them!

• First-timer Max read a very animated and well-performed poem in Spanish that seemed to transcend the language barrier for a good chunk of the audience

• First-timer Kay also managed to pull-off a difficult premise: a sexy poem that also managed to pay tribute to their late mother in the middle

• We had our monthly haiku slam this week! Despite some really close calls (the audience had a real hard time picking a winner between Kai and March in Round 2), a fiercely confident Lynette won in the final round over a set of brazen sexy and funny haiku by March Penn

Feature 05/20

Our feature this week was local poet and Providence Slam Team member, René Manual Ramos! René gave us a feel-good set about his journey in poetry over the past two years, starting with a poem about this progress from attending readings as “The Heartbreak Kid” to the time when “The heart breaks The Kid” as he got more into poetry slam. This was a very varied and unexpected set, topic wise. René opened up about his experience with alopecia (“Stress Marks”), learning to sew, being inspired to write about his mother after seeing a high school slam (“There’s no distance further than [the span of] my mother’s arms”), tattoos (“I thought I was ready for scar”) and his hometown of Lowell, MA. Thank you René!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week, we will have an open mic, and as part of our ongoing community nights, the feature will be a COMPLIMENT DEATH MATCH! That’s right, people will be facing off head-to-head and giving each other compliments, with the best compliment winning! It’s not too late to sign up on the fly, so come on down and join us!

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, May 6th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• “A line of iambic pentameter is a line of iambic pentameter” – from Bobby’s triple sonnet

• Zeke’s poem about the gratitude of still being alive, and an update on his former desire to be a poet that other poets talk about

• “How could you forget the moment before your first sin?” – Michelle

• A surprise group piece from Edie & Amy, featuring stage wandering and the distance between friends who aspire to find the time to meet up

• Hunter on “the entropy of a promise”, and Will S going meta about our alternate Wednesday venue for the week (shout out to The Foundry, who let us use their space on short notice!)

• The return to the mic of long-time staff/bartender Adam Stone, who read two excellent short poems, one about the head and the heart (“The heart wears a t-shirt and shorts in a blizzard”) and one titled “Instead of Linked In, I scroll through Tik Tok looking for work”

• “I only eat one food at a time, that already too many version of reality” – March Penn

• Myles’ raw and poignant tale of cab ride in Minneapolis and a failed attempt to visit the Renee Good memorial

Feature

Our feature was JeFF Stumpo, who brought an uninterrupted set of poems from his new book, “these are the waterfalls in my head”. JeFF gave a detailed introduction to himself and his poem suite, discussing his experience with mental illness, schizophrenia, and PTSD, and how he ended up writing down his dreams and nightmares as a way to extract them from himself. He told the audience to take a deep breath between each poem instead of clapping, and then proceeded to deliver one of the more singular features we’ve had in awhile. Each poem began with “Tonight you are ______” and described seemingly impossible sounding scenarios involving both violence and light, with family members showing up in a lyrical cloth of dream logic. Some of the opening lines of the highlights included “Tonight you are a security camera / you want to stop looking”, “Tonight you are the 10th child of a 10th child”, “and “Tonight, you are in the right body”. Thank you JeFF!

Coming Up This Wednesday

Tonight, besides our normal extended mic, we will have an open SPEED SLAM! You will need three poems that are 1 minute long. The winner gets $75 (!) and the top 2 qualify for the 2027 Boston Poetry Team Selection Slam.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, April 22nd & 29th, 2026

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NOTE: Tonight’s 05/06/26 show will be held at THE FOUNDRY, 101 ROGERS ST, Cambridge instead of the Cantab Lounge, due to a big concert happening there. Doors will be at 8 pm, Shortened open mic at 8:30, feature at 10 pm.

Open Mic Highlights 05/22

• Alex Kist’s incredible new piece “In the seconds before the seizure,” which describes the said situation as well as its tricky aftermath, where the doctors did not believe it actually happened.

• Aanchel’s piece about trying to kill their dreams, and how the dreams keep coming back, which ended with the dreams knocking on the poet’s door and asking them, “When will you come find me?”

• “We live in the wormy part of the apple that hasn’t been eaten yet” – Shivank

• Bobby Crawford’s “Dead End Job In San Diego”, a fun parody of Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ In The Free World” rewritten as “Keep On Clockin’ In At Sea World”

• Jarvis and Will’s “Trans Superhero Universe” group piece!

• The welcome return to the mic by Matt Richards and Ilse, and Alia’s stunning Trans / Greek Funeral Dirge piece that was so good that it got a shout out by Hanif later on!

• Myles’ “Letter to Megan Avon, who married the Avon River” where he asks her to help him burn down an AI data center

05/22 Feature

The incredible Hanif Abdurraqib graced our stage on 05/22, and if you haven’t watched or rewatched the livestream of his feature on our instagram, please do! Hanif opened up with a series of poems all titled “When all else fails you can always stay alive” and then dove through a set of new work with a sense of urgency, combining incredible lyricism, charismatic performance chops, and a strong sense of music mixed with devastating lines, metaphors, and universes. Other poem titles included “For better or worse I’m always a little bit in love,” “All the TV shows are about cops”. There was also work about seeing his late mother in his dreams, and poems after photos/paintings of the musicians Arthur Lee, Prince, Marvin Gaye, Lil’ Kim, Ghostface, and Mahalia Jackson. I could go on, but I wouldn’t do it justice! Thank you Hanif for continuing to come back to our show!

05/29/26 Recap By March Penn

• The open mic started with a group piece by Will and Mugs. A favorite line from their performance is “What would you do to get to a body you call home?”

• A favorite line from Alia’s piece: “on the train I am grieving in motion.”

• Shivank wowed the audience with a creative animal themed piece and a favorite line was: “I don’t believe in free will; I believe in free Willy”

• Edward combining lawyering and poetry, said “are you in therapy over something a poet said 40 years ago… you could be owed compensation” in an excellent example of using repetition to delve deeply into the topic and audience enthusiasm.

• Keaton did an Andrea Gibson cover about gender in betweeness and coming of age.

• We had a special group piece from Will and Bobbie and a favorite line was “let out the skeletons!”

• Sue Savoy read an acrostic poem called New York in which she sarcastically said “sure some of you are cute” thinking about Earth and aliens.

• While hosting Aparna said “I met a beautiful woman and I almost gave her my bike” in a bit about whether pretty privilege exists. Later Aparna revealed that she gave her bike helmet to the mysterious woman and now has the chance to see her again.

• Brynna hosted the mic on her birthday and brought us wonderful banter about her school day!!! Brynna’s found poem in the smoking section warmed our hearts!!!

• Aparna ended the smoking section with an incredible poem, including the line, “My poems run on their own two legs faster than I can keep up”.

• For our feature, we had the FRESH INK Slam, where poets performed new work never heard before on the Cantab stage! In the end Julie River was the winner in the final round over Winston Liao, and they both become the first people qualified for the 2027 BPS team selection slam.

Coming Up This Wednesday

NEWSFLASH: Tonight’s show will be held at THE FOUNDRY, 101 ROGERS ST, Cambridge instead of the Cantab Lounge, due to a big concert happening there. Doors at 8 pm, Shortened open mic at 8:30, feature at 10 pm. Our feature will be New England poet JeFF Stumpo!

Bio: JeFF Stumpo’s “these are the waterfalls in my head” was awarded the 2026 Granite State Poetry Prize by Diannely Antigua and collects a number of his lucid dreams and nightmares, as well as renders the hopes and fears of people he cares about into dreamscapes. Poems in it have been accepted to places including Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill Journal, The Journal, DMQ Review (which nominated theirs for a Pushcart), and Subnivean (where Major Jackson selected them for the Subnivean Award for Poetry). He’s a survivor of psychosis and PTSD, husband to a PhD chemist, and father to an amazing trans son. He has a (poor) website at www.JeFFStumpo.com.

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, April 15th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Phoenix’s piece discussing why they identify as Xenogender

• Julie River’s ode to Denver’s former poetry cafe, The Mercury (later known as The Pearl)

• Ed Gault’s “1-800-ANSWERS” poem dedicated to absurd prompts given by automated phone systems, and what happens when the automated system asks questions of you

• Scott’s nuanced and deeply symbolic tale of sexuality and water guns at a pool party, and Bobby’s persona piece about the guilt of the executor of Kafka’s estate, who was ordered to destroy all of Kafka’s work but instead published it all (yes, he may have woken up one day feeling like he had metamorphized into vermin)

• We had some tax day shenanigans where people could volunteer to see if we would give them a refund or deduction, which meant they would gain or lose some time on their open mic slot. Also, in honor of the upcoming Boston Marathon, March Penn read a poem that was 26.2 seconds long!

• The Haiku slam was also back this week! We had some moving work from Will S, a piece from Sue Savoy about how all Harvard Square bookstores are now banks, and fresh work from Iris, Carey, and Bobby. But it was new regular Danielle R who took the win in the final round over Kai. Danielle came well-prepared with three confident, humorous, and well-crafted pieces off the dome that set them apart from everyone else, and won them the $17 prize!

Feature

The crowd was stirring for a rare feature by Kaleigh O’Keefe! Kaleigh’s set revolved around activism, socialism, being trans and disabled, while also finding the time to sneak in some love poems. There were poem relating to their two top surgeries (“you scar beautifully, says the surgeon”), an ekphrastic poem (“Self Portrait in Pain”) after Frida Kahlo, a series of monostiches (!), informative pieces on political prisoner Leonard Peltier and socialist senate candidate Joe Tache, plus a poem about waking up 100 years from now in a post-capitalistic world, contemplating the idea that art doesn’t change the world but it changes people who can change the world. Thank you Kaleigh!

Coming Up This Wednesday

Come early, tonight will probably sell out as we will have a feature by the one and only Hanif_Abdurraqib! Check out his website and get ready for an amazing open mic and feature!

– MFG 🚪

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BPS Recap For Wednesday, April 8th, 2026

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Open Mic Highlights

• Former BPS graphic designer Jackie B opened up the mic with a poem about German clubbing, drugs, entropy, and the authenticity of the self vs who you are in a group

• Cantab veteran Julie River has moved back to the area, and brought us a scathing take on Mark Zuckerberg (“weasel-nosed meat pouch”) and Facebook’s loosening of content rules that has resulted in more unmoderated hate speech to the trans community

• Kyle wrote about driving in his father’s car and wearing his old clothes, and newcomer Ed wrote movingly about the recent Iran school bombing

• “Communism may be an opinion but rent is not” – from Phoenix’s poem on the validity and subjectivity of opinions

• Jennifer’s contrapuntal with the key line “Does a land remember a mother tongue like a body does?”

• The return of Sue Savoy and her poem that set out to curse the recipient, and Briana’s new poem where they “woke up on the roof of their mouth again”

• The smoking section was filled many staff tributes to our feature Aparna Paul, with Zeke writing about rivers, March writing about their mother, and Amy responding to the infamous “Wendy’s chili finger” poem that *shook* the room in such an off-kilter way that I don’t think anything I would say here could do it justice!!

Feature

After a couple of unexpected delays due to venue issues and other schedule mishaps, this week we finally got a full-length feature from staff member and five-time BPS team member Aparna Paul! Reading almost entirely from their new book, Home Free, Aparna started out with their extended “On waking up in bed and finding multiple snakes in it” piece and then deftly went through a series of well-loved open mic and slam favorites! We also got to hear a group piece where each line was read by a different member of the audience, a golden shovel based on a voicemail from Aparna’s mom (including a public airing of said voicemail) and their only-performed-once-before group piece with Myles Taylor about haunted cars. Aparna’s brazen creativity, lyrical precision, and ability to cut through uncomfortable situations with sharp insight and devasting turns are some of the cornerstones of our venue’s sound, and the audience was in rapt attention and appreciation throughout the entire feature. Thank you Aparna for your work!

Coming Up This Wednesday

This week we have a rare feature from local poet, organizer, and editor Kaleigh O’Keefe! Also, there will be some taxday shenanigans!

Bio: Kaleigh O’Keefe (they/them) is a gender outlaw, horror comic book enthusiast, and perpetual chess novice living in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Their poetry has appeared in In Between Spaces: an Anthology of Disabled Writers (Stillhouse Press, 2022), the VOX Unexplainable podcasts’ episode on endometriosis, won the PRIDE Poetry Prize in Passengers Journal, and is featured on indie music legend Ceschi’s album Sans Soleil. They are a contributor and editor for Liberation News, co-founder of Game Over Books, and co-organizer of the Liberation Open Mic at the Boston Liberation Center in Roxbury. Kaleigh is composed mostly of earl grey and has a measuring tape in their possession at all times. You can find them at www.kaleighokeefe.com and on social media @KaleighOKeefeOK.

See you later! 🐊

– MFG 🚪

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