January 2024 - Featured Artist - Bobby Crawford
About the Artist -
Bobby Crawford wandered into the poetry open mic at the Cantab Lounge in 2010 and has been a part of the New England poetry scene ever since. As an undergraduate student he led Emerson College’s spoken word group, the Emerson Poetry Project, and played an integral role in the organization’s growth. He has represented Lowell, MA; Manchester NH, and Boston, MA at the National Poetry Slam, appearing on the semi-finals stage with the Cantab team in 2016. He is the youngest ever and highest ever-ranked Boston Poetry Slam representative to the Individual World Poetry Slam, placing 15th in 2013. He has read and taught poetry all over the contiguous United States, was featured on Button Poetry, has been profiled in the Boston Globe, and published a full length collection, Only Show in Town, on Wilde Press in 2013. A career bartender, Bobby lives in the west end of Providence, RI.
Additional Works -
Poem “Church” Featured on Button Poetry
Featured Poems -
Where The One Can Take You
I got on the bus. The 1. No stop was my stop. I realized I could go anywhere. Where does this
1 go, you said. I don’t know, I said. I did. What do I want in this life, I wondered, as we went
by what was the taco place, was now not the taco place, only where I once held someone’s hand.
This is the intersection of where I became an adult and where I got too old to get any better at
anything. Didn’t there used to be a sex shop? Wasn’t there a roller rink? The Chinese
restaurant, closed on Tuesdays, where you have to pay in cash, where you kissed me, where is it?
Am I on the wrong 1? Is this not the 1? Where does one go when the 1 you’ve chosen does not
take one where one wants to go? I said to myself, I am lost, so I can go anywhere. I could get
any bus, at any time. I think I’ll take a few more busses, so long as they are definitely not the 1,
I said. But it’ll be awhile until I can get off this 1. This 1 stops at my old cardboard apartment.
This 1 waits a little longer, by the parking lot where they used to keep bad snow. This 1 ends up
at the tunnel underground, or the trolley-track graveyard, where all busses meet, in secret, to talk
about us, our miserable stupidity, busses ask themselves, of us, What are you waiting for? I am
waiting for the 1, at the intersection of how I love and how I want to love. At the intersection of
where you once lived and where I once lived, the driver said, You have to get off the bus now.
You can’t stay here anymore, said an old woman, her grocery bags on a seat I thought could be
mine. I looked up. You know, you said, I don’t love you anymore. I know, I said. I didn’t.