June 2025 - Featured Artist - Storey Campbell

About the Artist

Storey Campbell (she/her/hers) comes to The Untitled Open Mic from Boston, where she frequents open mics across the state and has featured all over New England. Her poetry has evolved raw and punk, exploring her transness, intersex identity, mental illness, and what it is to love like wildfire. When she's not writing poetry or science fiction, she's likely spending time with her wife and girlfriend, or studying toward her degree in social work. If you want to see her perform elsewhere, find her behind the mic of The Dirty Gerund Poetry Show in Worcester, MA, and at slams with the Dirty Gerund Road Show team.

Additional Works

Her pay-what-you-want poetry collection Trans Girl War Songs is available on itch.io.

Spellcasting, similarly, will be available here.

YouTube channel featuring performances can be found here.

Featured Poem -

How to Survive the Winter

Every tree remembers its first Autumn.

The first time cold was able to burrow

deep into its sorry excuse for a trunk,

the first time that it held onto its leaves,

numbered only in the dozens, so tightly,

as though if only it kept them attached to

its branches it could guarantee its survival.

As though it understood what was coming.

There is no way to know the scars that

cold will leave you. The places where your

bark bubbles from the water freezing inside,

the gnawing pain of another creature seeking warmth,

desperate for shelter, the cold slowness of dying,

unsure if you will survive until it is warm again.

Every tree remembers its misfound hope

in the face of oncoming Winter.

Spite, to them, to us, like a fuel - Winter wishes

them to fall and so they will not fall.

It is a warmth like charcoal in a furnace.

They forget what charcoal was, once.

They run out of spite soon enough.

I have felt this cold crawl up my spine and

chew through my bark and seek shelter among

my bones. I have thought I knew what was

coming, like I was the deer and it,

it was the headlights. I was wrong.

Every time I have been wrong.

What do we do when we run out of spite?

Is a tree before its winter the same tree

that comes out the other side?

Does a tree in the cold biting wind,

losing its leaves, feel the pain of

every lost one as it decays at its feet?

I bear the scars of Winter and leaf-fall

on every single ring, buried deep down

to my core, to that sorry excuse for a trunk.

You would never know it unless I was felled,

unless the Winter took me.

I have wondered if I will survive the cold

and sometimes, even as I grew new leaves,

been unsure if it was really me who survived.

People tell us, we trees, that someday

Spring will come, as if the fact that our

forest will be thinner than it has ever been

is nothing, as though they were weak for

not surviving. Spring may come, yes,

our forest will be green again, verdant and lifeful,

but then another winter is less than a year away.

How long until none of us are left?