 Hello and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to this month's poem jam. I'm John Smalley, a librarian with the General Collections in Humanities Centers here in the main library on the third floor. I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to let you know about a few of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the public library, we want to welcome you to the unceded homeland of the Ramatusha Lone who are the original habitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatusha Lone have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working in their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatusha community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. You may have heard this month, the library is celebrating with partners the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses. And there are exhibits and programs, readings, film screenings, and concerts. There's actually three exhibits in this library, two on the third floor, one on the sixth floor. And there are Bloomsbury flyers on the table. Also coffee and cookies, please help yourself. On Wednesday, June 15th, author Chris Menjoper will discuss his new book, Black Ghost of Empire, The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation. And this event will be online. At the end of the month, musicologist Mark Burford, author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field, will discuss the famous gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson. Mark's a great speaker and he'll be illustrating his talk with sound clips, possibly video clips. That will be a treat. He also has a wonderful voice himself. You can find flyers to all of these events on the table there, as well as I mentioned limited edition poem jam pins. And that ends my announcement. So now I wanna turn the mic over to poem jams host, Kim Chuck, who will introduce the program. And readers, please welcome Kim. It's fun to be back here at the main library doing in-person readings. I couldn't be more delighted. And I'm particularly excited about tonight because we've got four poets who have one thing solidly in common, which is that the first time I ever heard each of them read blew me away. So I'm really excited about tonight. Weirdly, I kind of accidentally put together an LGBTQ reading. It wasn't what I set out to do. I actually put this reading together because of politics that were happening around the country. And I think we just really need to be very clear on how important it is to really engage in what's going on. So our first reader tonight is Dana Rod, who I'm trying desperately to remember how I met Dana the first time. I think I can usually default to having been introduced to any poet these days by Paul Corman Roberts. But I knew that it was really important to continue to pay attention to his work. He has a really incredible book out called Scattered Arrows, which you should absolutely buy and buy in multiples to give away to friends. And with that, I think we're going to do some kind of tech magic and summon Dana on the screen. And the first one is called What You Want to Touch but Can't. Shimmered splendor, a creature in blue and gold purple and shine, I am the iridescence on the fish, oil slick on the puddle, mirrored tile on the disco ball. It's my pleasure to be your spectacle, moving tender life and crisp, that glow you dust on top of your collar bones, covered in seafoam to the brink of the beach. Kindly soft, the space where hunger lingers, I feed you. I sit in the depths of the rugue and the back of your throat waiting to catch what chokes you, boy after boy. Wipe the blade clean, leave damp glistenings on your towels. We sing to precious things lingering in the dark, straining against what we need, prostrate on what is left behind. Sun penetrates each part of myself, stuck in a pot of kaleidoscope colors that we grab an empty at will. We still together, a crush of hues we mix because we couldn't find them before. One touch and we stick to glue. This next poem is called Gamma Aminobutric Acid or GABA. GABA is a neurotransmitter that tends to be quite low in people with anxiety or mood disorders. This poem is called GABA. Worry is another love. To worry is to love. Sweet talismans of take care, be well. Not enough to guard against metal sharpened teeth, biting down on inner cheeks, salted salivary shame flowing down through lips. My mother's love is worried cuticles, scorched forearms forcing a plastic lid of never sour enough must open, tanged with thick prepped herbs that radiate love, a worried radiation full of sweet morsels to feed syrup down your throat. Raw short nails scoring the plain of Mars, kindling flames humming at glassy eyed, worry sheared razor thin, roasted fat, dripping hot burning flesh, wiping out well-being. My mother's love, a sun small enough to burn me encompassing warmth, copper hot and floral, mint alighting on my tongue, a radiated comfort fleeting against border creases in our eyes. Mirror the way my love is worried, care tossed and wrapped around my figure, refreshed to pink and blue plump little cakes, climbing to dream ourselves wicked, Benzo's bitter on our tongues, unease dissolving sharp and metallic, worry burned brightly away under accountably, a challenge forgotten. Perpetual motion, hyacinth unfurls under a probiscus touch, petals whose delicacy attracts the buzzing eye line to sip from expectant faces. Why do bees dance from flower to flower, feed from mouth to upturned mouth, swirling in the soft waltz to coat their throats with congealed sugar? A genetic mandate to feed, fuck, sleep and do it all over again when the sun's rays peek through the horizon. A virus's biological imperative is to spread its fingers in each of ourselves. A viral imperative to migrate, mutate, adapt for survival, to outrun, out infect. When tulips bloomed in variegated fringe, tulip mania blossomed as well. A bulb worth a house, dutch hands, planting bulbs together, tiger striped petals fetching top dollars to capture beauty for ourselves. Clever tulipa, who knew our taste for flowers were killing the ones we loved, stunting bulbs, breaking weak. We believe we choose our own volition, synapses firing free will again, again, again and again, yet the taste of need is never sated, always craving more sucrose to fire, more light in our brains, hydrogenated oil slicking along my taste buds to stuff my arteries. Every day I swallow ordered chaos, billions of organisms, capsuled in poor sign gelatin to balance my gut as somewhere in an ocean, a plastic bag rests in a seal's stomach mistaken for jellyfish, wasting inside. A biological imperative to nourish, yet we diminish, desiring a place to rest upturned faces away from each radioactive ray, away from the devouring incisors of bugs, feasting on leaves, stamens, stems and petals. We want to settle in the dirt back where we came from. His next two poems are not from the Scattered Arrows Collection and I have been fortunate enough to read at the San Mateo County's Transgender Day of Remembrance. And I feel very silly at times being there reading my poems about being non-binary when there are activists and slaying kin's names being read and these next two poems were inspired from my experience. Go fund yourself. Wake up, get my phone, which draws me like the moon. It's a dangerous new day as I scroll through each story flashing a desire to leave consciousness. We witness cries through this portal every day, hearts to heads that cry for funds to push our evolutions which breed disquiet for others who do not understand. But we refuse to bend, push each moment against moonlight without it watering down our features. You didn't know the sparkling bits of us until you sank low to the ground, thought us artifice until our corpses proved to you how real we were, are, still are and have been under your fingers. You felt the house music smashing the disco ball to the ground and look down. See the broken car windshield glass mixed with dirt, humbly crossed what fear dripping like a newborn miracle. I know my tongue rusted against time, but cool liquid loosened. You can hear me. So this is my last poem for this evening. Thank you so much to the Essex Public Library for having me and to Kim Shuck for making sure my words had a platform. This next poem is called Remembrance. My mother asks, See not to am I Cardi, did you get surgery on your chest? And I know what she is really asking is why, because she can tell what shapes are not there anymore. And I have to ask, what will this answer bring you? What does awareness bring us? What will the answer to this question bring me? Besides more scrutiny to what my bones have written on them etched in the womb. Every year, the list of our names get longer and lives cords are cut shorter, killed by those who love yet fear us. Despite trying to be someone who you want to know, are you waiting to know us? I could say, wait for it, it'll be worth it, but fear asks, will you care? If I'm not performing the body of queer trauma, of what was done to this body, what am I besides feeding tongues and hungry mouths? And yet I am so hungry for what you have. For sharp planes eschewing softness that traverse my body, my leaves unfurling. How does the space my body take become a lie? I could answer, I feel like I have done everything you have asked of me within reason. Folded myself into a cornerless thing, no sharp edges to bump against to harm yourself, yet it's still not enough. The way I am is abrasive. And I guess that's why we don't talk. But you would say that it's me, I am the problem that I need to predict the rules of what runs this household changing on a dime, the truth becoming something malleable, fluid, to what suited you best myself, a tribute offering on the altar of what rotted there, my rot the problem, my rot resulting from lack, so much lack, where there was nothing to enter but fester. I'm trying to be someone who you want to know, but I don't need to be because we are divine, our blood sacred, and that's why you wanna drink it so badly. Are you aware? I think you are with each body slaying. My mother asks, see, not to answer, mother asks, see, not to a mild cardee, did you get surgery on your chest? And I know what she's really asking is how, how could you do that to me? Thank you. I get asked almost every week when I read my own work, whether I think poetry is important. And yeah, I do. I also think the act of making poems is important because it involves a certain amount of fearlessness and that was pretty fearless. Our next poet also is fearless and is one of my role models in some interesting ways. I think we've read together in four decades at this point. We've certainly known each other that long and before we ever read poetry together we were doing politics together and this particular reading happened because of one of Tommy's poems and I just invite you to enjoy Tommy Avakoli Mecca's work as much as I do. Come on up, Tommy. Thank you, Kim. I guess I can take the mask off up here and I've gotta find my glasses or I'll never be able to see what I'm reading. I hear they are. Sorry, I'm at that age where I need reading glasses as much as I don't like to admit it but so my poetry is very political as you can probably imagine but I'm gonna start off with something that's not as political. My father and I didn't get along. He couldn't accept that I was queer and it took me a long time after he died to stop writing angry poetry about him but I did and this poem, I'm very proud of this poem because it shows emotional growth that I really needed to happen but it took a long time to happen so this poem is called Gone. Gone is the small gas station in South Philly. He operated for over 50 years. Gone are his blue overalls that always stank of gasoline and despair. Gone is the grease embedded in his pores and under his nails that oozed out with his sweat. Gone are the six to seven days a week he worked. Gone is the 4 a.m. he woke up every day. Gone is the homeless man who slept in the alley and the sandwich he always bought him. Gone are his friends, the immigrant Italian men complaining about the kids who had no respect for the Pella Via Vecchia. No respect for the old ways. Gone are the stray dogs who always ended up living at the station. Gone are the nights sitting out on the stoop staring at the moon the way a lone wolf does. Gone are the crickets and the lightning bugs that made him smile and the birds that he secretly fed. Gone are the day trips to Atlantic City, the only vacation he ever took. Gone are the neighbors who were just un poco di sol di a little short of money like he was, but he always emptied his pockets anyway. Gone is the heart that he wished he didn't have. Gone are the tears shed after he forced his queer son to leave home. Gone is the wife who took him off life support after his third stroke. Gone is the funeral procession that drove past the boarded up gas station he lost just before he died. Gone are the prayers to a death mute God. Gone are the unfertilized dreams. Gone is the man I never knew. Yeah, family relationships are. We all go through them, we all go through the intensity, but being a poet, the great thing about being a poet is that you can work through them in your poetry and come up with poems like that. I mean, I love that poem, so it's one of my favorites. I wanna pay tribute to the, I don't know how many people here know and you probably don't because you live on the West Coast, but in Philadelphia in around 1954, the early 50s, dry queens used to march on Halloween night through the center of the city and thousands of people would gather to watch them and cheer them on and sometimes jeer at them and say rude things, but they were really some of the first pride marches and they were done by these just very defiant drag queens. This is Halloween night and Halloween, by the way, was considered a sacred holiday in the queer community because it was a safe time to go out and drag, relatively safe time to be walking around and drag. Fed up with being arrested, beaten, raped at the police station, tired of every joke told at your expense, every job you couldn't get, every street you couldn't walk, every breath you couldn't take, silent no more you took to your feet on that holiest of nights when you felt the safest, ignored the jeers, accepted the cheers, everyone had hair to let down, skeletons stashed in their closets, you had none, you dared to go maskless every day of the year. Courage is not just doing the right thing, it's doing the most difficult when it's most difficult. And then after I came out in 71, I came out as a drag queen and started living in drag for many, many years, but my first experience getting into drag was actually at home when I was still living at home on Halloween night, and this is that experience. And there's one Italian word of here, putana, but I think you all understand that, it means whore, putana, it's like puta in Spanish. I slipped my skinny 20-year-old body into my sister's dress. It hung an inch or so above the knees, a length that would have landed her in detention at St. Maria Gretti High School. I generously smeared foundation on my freshly shaved face, packed on the eyeliner, mascara, red lipstick. I felt safe. No one in the neighborhood would bother me. It was Halloween, the one night I could shed gender like a cocoon, celebrate Mardi Gras from the binary, take a vacation from having to prove I was a man. Papa shook his head disapprovingly, walked out of the room. Mama laughed nervously, you look like a putana. It's just a costume, Mama, I said, but I knew better, and so did she. I don't know how I'm doing on time here, but just got a couple more here. Actually, I'm trying to decide between two. I think I'm gonna do this poem, it's a little painful, but I think it's important to remember this history too. Back in the 60s and early 70s, they were doing a version therapy on gay men everywhere in this country, and I was involved with a campaign to get our university, Temple University in Philly, to cut off funding to the Eastern Psychiatric Pizza in Pennsylvania, Psychiatric Institute, which was funding a version therapy. So they would shuffle gay men who came into the counseling program who said they were gay, and they would shuffle them off to epi to get shocked. And one thing I should just mention, Atoscadero was the place out here in California that was notorious for doing it. And queers, once gay liberation started, they used to call it Dock Cow for queers. Strip. Put on the dressing gown. Enter the dark room where they strap you to a chair. It won't hurt, they say, as they attach electrodes to your genitals. Flash slides of cute naked guys bump up the electricity. Naked girls appear on the screen. No shocks. Over and over until the projector stops. It's motor humming monotonously. It's light falling onto a white screen. White scream shatters inside you like glass in an earthquake. They remove the electrodes, unstrap you from the chair. Leave your heart erupting, your stomach tumbling down the mountain side. Your crotch on fire. No lobotomy, drug-induced vomiting, or feeling of drowning like at Atoscadero. Dock Cow for queers. You hurt for days, weeks. Your mind in chaos. Your thoughts running in all directions. Like ants when a heavy rain falls. You found relief in a bottle of pills hiding in that one place they could never find you. Yeah, and I'll finish with this. This was published three years ago, four years ago, on the street sheet. The paper that's produced by four and about homeless people. They published on the front page, which I wasn't expecting. They asked me to contribute something for their Pride edition, and I never expected this would end up on the front page. It's called My Pride. My Pride is defiant and raw. It's not polite. It isn't marketable. It won't show up in the Dow Jones averages. It's not running for office or joining the police force, the military, the church. It won't cooperate with the FBI, CIA, or Homeland Security. It doesn't put kids in cages, tear gas asylum seekers, or criminalized homelessness. It knows that changing laws and electing politicians is not enough. It isn't a ribbon, a flag, a beer, or a hashtag. It isn't trending or being tweeted. It's not a Russian bot or a meme. It's not going shopping or something I ordered online. It doesn't stay in an Airbnb or call a Lyft. It doesn't have a buffed body, a designer wardrobe, or a supply of party drugs. It doesn't let me forget all the murdered gay men and trans women of color. The years that gay sex and drag were illegal or how this nation stood by and let my friends die. It understands that no matter how much things seem to change, I'm still not safe. My pride is ever on guard and always in your face. Thank you. It's when I'm completely floored by people's response to me asking them to do this because it's an act of trust and I don't take it for granted. And I just wanna say on the subject of laws, the subject of laws was what I was thinking about when I put this reading together and the way in which the laws in this country started out trying to define who was a person and who wasn't a person and they continue to do that. And I understand that not everybody is going to understand everything. I don't understand everything nobody here does, but you cannot legislate people out of existence. It doesn't. Our next poet, as really with all of the poets here, I consider to be a good friend. E.K. Keith is one of those hero teachers, school librarian and there's more than one of those here tonight too, but I've just, this is terrible, your book's next to my bed and I cannot think. Ordinary villains from Nomadic Press. E.K. Hey everybody, it's nice to see you all in person again. This is very exciting. And thank you, Kim, for inviting me to read today and thank you, San Francisco Public Library. I was really excited when I clicked on the website event and the link on my name links to the catalog record of my book, Ordinary Villains, and that was really cool. So thanks for getting my book, SFPL. Yeah, it's an honor to be invited to read for Pride Month. Although everyone knows, it bears reminding everyone that bisexual people are not defined by their partners and really that's what bisexual erasure is about, is that sometimes people see you and sometimes they don't. So here's a poem that's about the world. Girl Scouts Lament. Why does everything in the world seem so much worse? When I have spent my life leaving things better than I found them, the nerve pinches the arm goes numb. Also, so this next piece I wrote last year and I believe that black liberation is the keystone to the liberation of all oppressed peoples. Anti-racism is a state of mental health. We can't see each other any more than we can see ourselves. It's like sometimes on a rough day, an ugly person looks back at me from the mirror on the bathroom wall and I think, damn, where did that pretty woman go? Is she hiding back there somewhere in mirror land? I have my suspicions about the ability of science to describe how a mirror really works. What if it's not the mirror, but the eye and how we see collectively is racism, a societal dysmorphia that results in self-hatred and self-harm. What would it be like to be the light, particle, wave, something not quite yet described, to be the light in the mirror, reflected, deflected, redirected, does a light particle see her own intensity and flinch and if I can barely see myself and you can barely see yourself, what does that mean when we look at each other? We change how. We change who we see. Use the mirror, get the hate out of the eyes. So it's been strange times for a couple of years now and I've been writing a lot about friendship because that's how we get through. Friendship is time plus proximity. Time plus time spent. What we purchase with time spent is connection and mutual support. The wine is always delicious and we laugh. Friends are planets with shifting orbits. For years we orbit close, so tight and then things change. And then things change. Marriages, babies, new jobs, the pandemic and the orbit widens. For me, friends are always welcome to spin my way, sometimes faster, sometimes years go by, but then there they are. So these next two pieces, and I'll just hold these up because I'm somewhat proud of them, I am a teacher librarian and I taught a writing class this year, which is a little bit unusual for school librarians, but I was concerned that we were gonna go back to Zoom life and I didn't wanna be unmoored from the students like I was last year. So this is our semester publication for my writing class and it's pretty cool. So I published a poem in two comics, it's called Strange Days. Oh, these are on actually both of these fans of San Francisco Public Library. If you wanna look at them, they are at the Portola Branch Library on the teen shelf. So Nicole Termini-Termin is awesome librarian and she keeps the kids connected with each other. So my poem in here, and these are all things that I wrote with the young people. Second period, the light gets in my eyes from the ceiling-mounted projector every morning like a small artificial sun in a galaxy of dust motes. Who knows what small creatures cling to the dust floating in the library. What if they're really tiny worlds swirling in a chaotic universe populated by small beings who hope for health and peace and a comfortable place to sleep and enough food for everyone, just like us. I also run a poetry and art club and this is the anthology that we put together. Teeth, I forgot you wore braces, Madison says to Sophie in the library after school before we start to write our Monday poems. Madison looks at a picture of Sophie without her mask. Maybe one of the small benefits of COVID is not having the excruciating self-consciousness of braces on view. We're investigating each other's phones, Sophie explains this ritual of modern friendship and Madison finds a picture of Sophie's dog's tooth, a canine's tooth, still fresh enough to see the blood in the nerve. It's creepy. So of course I have to enlarge it for a closer look at the layers visible from enamel to root. We laugh, showing no teeth behind our masks we wear by our own choice, hoping for at least some protection from a disease that bites and bites and bites like a rabid dog. And at last I will leave you with Tempus Fugit. My alternate realities are fantasizing about time travel as a weekend getaway. Take in a double feature in an old art deco theater with crushed red velvet seats that spring up when you stand and sticky floors. Everything on screen is the golden age that never was, stories fragmented frame by frame, nothing but light in love with its own hype. My alternate realities are fantasizing about a future where we figure out how to feed everybody and how everybody has a place to live because we've changed our minds and we can see that the abundant earth can still hold us all because we know what is shared won't be wasted or exploited. I'm traveling forward in time through space. I have no control over this. Only the work of my own hands making reality. I'm traveling forward in time in my mind, a kind of time machine. Imagination takes me back and pushes me forward. Imaginable futures waiting for action. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's the little things that count the most. Regular habits like not buying paper towels and food wrapped in plastic. Simple actions to make an imaginable future possible, real, don't wait, leave dystopia behind. Thanks everybody. It's not an ideal situation but because I do not see Poet E. Spoken frequently enough, I remember precisely when we met. We met at a poetry reading that I put on. We were introduced by Paula Corman Roberts and she blew the room away. I am a huge fan of this poet. And I suspect you will also be after you listen to her work. Please welcome to the microphone Poet E. Spoken. I think it's very important to start off with this disclaimer. So this is called My Comfort Zone. You know you made it. What the subject of who you fuck or how you identify becomes the topic of a national debate. Throwing props on my name as pronouns, break down the shame and define who we are. Bible belts quoting scriptures behind closed doors, screen those tongue twisters of God. See, you make it hard when the choice may be as simple as stepping outside that box because you cannot keep me in check. I'll bend your unconscious. This celestial black goddess has got you open by the way I offer no explanation. So my preference depends on who's asking. You're damn right I'm comfortable in my own skin because I will not be defined by your labels. So this next poem is called AIDS and I lost so many friends, so many loved ones, so many people, but one in particular really touched my heart and that was Ben and we used to dance together. Yeah, Poet E. Spoken was on the break dancing scene original B-Girl, yeah, yeah. So this is called AIDS. He was too afraid to let anybody know what he was going through, but after a while we pretty much knew. But all I can do is watch as this disease almost destroyed his whole entire family, but at his funeral they didn't grieve, they came to pay tribute to Mr. Freeze and it wasn't about how he taught the kids pop, lock and break dancing, one by one they used march down the aisle, the pomp and circumstances, talking about how Ben got them off the streets and gave them a second chance and now that he is gone and we're still living, we hesitate to step up to the plate to give these youths something to believe in and part of the reason is that we still don't know the stereotypes of the downlose and who's creep and when this disease is not about who you sex, it's about teaching. Right about now the best cure is prevention and I hear some of the drugs for this disease does more damage than the infection and condoms have little relief when you're injected and into your veins as nine months later another statistic is born into the strand, I swear. I would rather have cancer because even if this is a building disease you would still embrace me, you would run more than a mile and make me your post up child and have parties in honor of my memory like if I'm some damn celebrity. But if I had AIDS, my so-called friends would no longer be and as I walk on by you would step to the side as if this disease knows boundaries, afraid and alone out here on my own I became my own worst enemy didn't wanna look in the mirror playing the guard that you will see things clear cause all I ever wanted was for you to be there for me a simple and great for my to give me the will to survive so save the guilt trip wipe those tears from your eyes if you couldn't do it when I was alive. It damn sure doesn't mean nothing to me when I die. That's in peace Ben. I mean in 2021 I had the pleasure of learning that they found my second great grandfather Joshua Halsey. He was murdered in the insurrection in North Carolina in 1898 as so was so many people but to discover where he was located was unprecedented. And this is around the pandemic, this is around everything that was happening, kids being murdered and all these sort of things and someone called me, said you know, probably this is really, really on my heart could you write something, could you do something? So these last couple of poems I'm gonna do I'm dedicating it to my family. I'm going down the North Carolina August 26th to do my book release because I only thought it was fitting to do it on the spot where my grandpa was murdered. So this next piece is called Waiting to Exhale. They dropped tear gas and hunted a few ropes and garages. And I can't count the number that swung on trees collected six souls last week in a nation that has wrapped this fabric of hate around my innocence, swore allegiance to a badge so now laws are paper thin but with seeds fall, roots of change are planted in. You see those I can't breathe sign and those open hills are priceless as another baby is murdered at a protest civil unrest and you could attest that the only time I see you giving air hugs is when something happens. So I hope this clears your conscience you see I saw signs that say their names but we all know in a few short years that they shall become nameless but I saw traces of Yusef and Trayvon when the mood was running and the words of Rocky muster hang out for Mario because although the chair and handcuff they still kept punching his identity and you don't need trees to hang in a jail cell so I cried out for my sister Sandra and wondered did it take 41 shots to kill Brianna and why was Tamir shot for playing with a toy gun when Nicholas had a real one? He shot up 17 but left the scene breathing while Willie and Rashad were both killed in drive-thrus like drive-by so fuck your all lives matter signs so after my sip I poured some out for the 400 years stuffed a rag in my cocktail and burned Joe's shit cause we are tired of being your targets but it didn't take 45 but a minute to call the National Guards in might even drop bombs on unarmed civilians justify the homicides through insurrections another sundown town you can't even walk in from Tulsa, Georgia, Minnesota, Oakland Staten Island, Wilmington, yes this whole entire nation I swear grandpa Halsey sometimes I feel like the candle is burning from both ends but as a child of a bottle I given the breath of life but I love to do my day I spit fire in the name of truth and justice for all those you thought you silenced when I okay this last piece I'm gonna do it's called how flowers get their names I dedicate this to my my family and all the loved ones who lost their flowers welcome to community gardens complete with chain link fences and surveillance a place where mothers still smell the blood of where the babies were slain where murals have been defaced and replaced with signs of keep out no one beyond this point punishable by fines and or imprisonment a place where movements have been reduced to signs on t-shirts that I can't afford to capitalize on cause you see me too in black lives and look taking a knee has become too damn expensive a place where indigenous and First Nation peoples have been murdered and uncovered well this is not a shocking secret this is a pandemic that you can't cover over so you see we're not talking roses because they're seasonal we're not talking daisies because they're easy to uproot and while apocryphaloposis have been associated with the deaths of the Josh Halsey's the Emmett Till's the Makiya Bryant's the George Floyd's the Sandra Bland's the Breonna Taylor's the Mike Brown's the Willie McCoy's the indigenous and First Nation peoples and the countless of victims whose names we will never know but they also send a message of forget me thanks thank you all for coming to tonight's poem jam one more round of applause for all the poets including Dana Rod who started our program please come back second Thursday next month we have the revolutionary poets speaking on their new anthology poets for the planet environmentalism we're celebrating next month and help yourself to coffee and cookies on the whale and flyers of our upcoming events look forward to seeing you again next time thank you