May 8th: Marc D. Goldfinger and Linda Larson Feature

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. The month long celebration of Stone Soup Poetry continues on May 8th with Marc D. Goldfinger and Linda Larson, two poets connected to the popular Spare Change News and its poetry section.

Marc D. Goldfinger has been published by the Ibbetson Street Press, The Aurorean, Pegasus, The Boston Poet, Clamor magazine, Earth First! and the Crooked River Press among others. He is currently the poetry editor of the Spare Change News, a paper put out for the benefit of homeless people. He is a counselor for people with Substance Use Disorders and some of hiswork has been used to augment courses at theUniversity of Massachusetts in Boston. He is also a member of the Highway Poets, a motorcycle club whose members have been published throughout the world.

Linda Larson was born in 1947. She began writing poetry in elementary school and published in school publications in Evanston, Illinois and at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. In 1970 she graduated with a M. A. in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Influenced by T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Bly she continued to write for publication. At the same time she battled mental illness for over three decades. Her peripatetic lifestyle resulted in the loss of many manuscripts. From 1997 through 2002 Larson was the editor of Spare Change News, a Cambridge-based newspaper that reports on and serves people experiencing homelessness. For the last three years she has been co-leading a recovery group at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital for people like herself, diagnosed with both mental illness and substance abuse. This is her first poetry reading since the 1970's.

Sample poems are below:

The Wake-Up
for Mary Esther

One bright eye peeks
out at the world, still dark
with the shade of mourning. She
is not sure whether it is

safe to throw off her cover,
come out to dance with
the uncertainty of day.
Life is like that

sometimes, on other days
the sun is blinding through
the Easter window of the room
she now shares with the man

who loves her. He smiles at
the shadows cast by life until
they back off, grins down
the throat of hard-luck

until it coughs up sunlight
and then he kisses
her forehead, says, "It's all
right now, breakfast is ready."


--Marc D. Goldfinger



For The Love of Your Bones

The murderous
Ticking of the clock
Wants you to feel
The back of your neck
Gliding upwards
In a glissando
Of absolute elegance. . .
Time impales me
On the tip
Of my senses
As no sunset,
Nor constant star
Ever could. . .
When I die
I'm going to live
On the other side
Of your blue sky eyes.

--Linda Larson