July 9th: Erin Reardon Features

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On July 9th, Stone Soup welcomes new writer to the local scene Erin Reardon for her first feature.

Erin fancies herself more of a recovering Catholic who is still trying to find herself and her voice, using writing as a tool to purge her often overloaded mind. Her poems are sometimes sad, and often darkly comical. Many are tales of religious confusion, female hormonal rages, love, life, frustration and loss. She gains most of her inspiration through people-watching in barrooms, hospitals, the ever-cliche coffee shops and basically just running around the streets of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.

Her heroes include Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Anne Sexton, Dorothy Parker, and Charles Bukowski. She has been published in Quillbillies literary magazine, and has several pieces pending in other literary 'zines both in print and online. She has done open mic nights at Stone Soup and Open Bark and at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge. She also has 2 self-published collections, Tales of a Sunday School Dropout and Sleeping on a Bed of Percocet White, which will be available at her feature or she can send you one ($4.00 each which includes shipping, $3.00 each at the show) if you drop her a line at tigerlilygirl66@yahoo.com She currently works at a non-profit in Cambridge and resides in Arlington, Massachusetts. A sample poem follows below.


Skin

Skin is so fragile
So simple
So curious
Easy to tear at
Easy to caress

Skin is useless
Unless it is tasted
Wanted
And most of all touched

She liked to watch hers
Open up so wide
Making crimson waterfalls
She liked to poke it
Tease it
Ruin it

She hated her skin
Until
It found his.

--Erin Reardon