#boaat

[bostonpoetryslam]

Cruelty after all is made of distance — sign here & the world ends somewhere else. The world. The literal world.

Cameron Awkward-Rich, “The Cure for What Ails You,” published in BOAAT

[lifeinpoetry]

I want to know do I

hurt people because of what

they made me feel or do I

have feelings I have always had

and try to make the world

look like it gave them to me?

— Margaret Ross, from “History,” published in BOAAT

[mortalpractice]

Love me and there will be ripe apricots. Hugs. Velvet. Silk. Have some. Love notes,

folded into swans. Brioche. Soft, folded sweaters. Please, they’re yours. Boiled

wool. It’s so fine if you accept my offerings and smile and throw them away

around the corner. Folded self on slightly mussed sheets. Knees

folded into belly. Butter. Folded corners of pages with folded hearts inside. Shy

& soft but a snail doesn’t go to die when it slides back into its shell,

it waits to move when the world will let it move at its own pace. I shy

& I soft & I don’t hold your hand until I know you can tender.

— Andy Powell, from “Now For the Real Me,” published in BOAAT

[pigmenting]

Have you ever seen the dark split / into two peaches? Sickness is a lot like that.

Shira Erlichman, from “Ode to Lithium #75: Mind Over Matter” published in BOAAT

[lifeinpoetry]

tell me I make you feel the way you feel / to sense wings overhead in the dark / tell me I’m the one shot deer who tramples the shooter

—  Claire Meuschke, from “Neutral,” published in BOAAT

[lifeinpoetry]

A street called Main. A room called bed. My lover’s back at daybreak

offering itself for scratching—lower, lower,

higher now, now harder, yes, like that.

— Maggie Millner, from “Aubade,” published in BOAAT

[lifeinpoetry]

I believe in doom and all its sister griefs

I believe in my thoughts reducing me to negligible

I believe in the words that I make up to color myself

— Sahar Muradi, from “Paper a Small Life,” published in BOAAT

[lifeinpoetry]

In the migratory sense, I was returning to myself,

a leather suitcase by my ankle like a choice.

It all makes sense when you’re alive,

though I couldn’t explain it to anyone who wasn’t:

the books, the sour rain, our walking home all doomed and glad and apple-eyed,

so cold and red because of it, because of having skin.

— Maggie Millner, from “Aubade,” published in BOAAT