 So in terms of this evening, this is our programming for tonight. So Rebecca Jamison, a second year student, will be introducing Justin Bigos, our poetry faculty member here in the MFA in Writing and Publishing program. After Justin reads, Amara Okola will be introducing Ariel Francisco, also a poet, and visiting faculty member in our program. Hassan Alchiouk will be introducing Kristina Marie Darling and Chris Campagnoni. They're both poets and prose writers, and there are visiting guests in our program this week, so we're so excited to have them and see what they're doing in terms of collaboration and their own work. So that is our lineup for tonight, and I'm going to introduce Rebecca Jamison to take it away. Thanks. OK, Justin. I'm going to try to get this mic as high as I can in preparation for you and me. So hi, everyone. Hi. So they say that if you want to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader. So before I tell you about Justin Bigos, the writer, I feel like I have to tell you about Justin Bigos, the reader. As Justin's student, I've had the privilege of being in many workshops with him, and the only way I can describe the depth, care, and insight with which he reads my and other students' work is to compare it to a superpower. Justin possesses creative x-ray vision, seeing through layers of meaning and craft that you didn't even know were there. It's like watching a gemstone expert crack open an ordinary gray rock, only to find that there are amethysts inside. Justin has a knack for supporting what is strongest in the work, reflecting on the choices you're making as a writer with such insight and precision that you realize exactly what's needed to crack open the dull surface of your piece and discover the jewels inside. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I can turn to Justin's equally impressive writing. He's the author of the poetry collection Mad River by Goldwig Press in 2017, as well as the chapbook 20,000 Pigeons from I.O. in 2014. His poems, stories, essays, and interviews with poets appear in publications, including New England Review, The Seattle Review, Plowshares, Southern Indiana Review, McSweeney's Quarterly, The Rumpus, and the Best American Short Stories of 2015. He co-founded and co-edits the literary magazine Waxwing. Justin is faculty in the MFA program in writing and publishing here at VCFA, where we are very fortunate to be his students. He lives in Barrie with his wife Erin Stalkup and their daughter Talia. Join me in welcoming Justin Pigeons. I can do my best with this. Where are you? There you are. I really thought Rebecca was going to tell you something she and all my students found out for the first time today, which is that I was once, well, for a couple years in neighbors with Mr. Rogers. This is a fun fact. This is true of Fred Rogers, right? What's up? So you should miss that. I know, that's OK. Well, I just told you. Thank you so much. That was such a generous introduction. And all stuff I'll put on my CV. And thank you. So I'm actually going to try something different. I've been writing a lot of fiction for the past few years, trying to get back into fiction writing. I've been working on a novel, which is sort of exhilarating and terrifying, because I've never written a novel. So it sort of feels like when I first started writing, I really didn't know what I was doing. So again, it was really fun and kind of scary. But I know novels sometimes are best prefaced with excerpts with just a little bit of info. So just a couple of things, I guess. It's tentatively titled, Connecticut Nocturne. I've got a slip disc in my back, so I need to take care of myself. I'm going to read from the second chapter, which I wrote this summer. The protagonist is about six years old, which I understand is a challenge where we're going to go with it, or you can go. And it takes place in 1979 in December. And the protagonist's name is Tadeush, and it goes by Dayush as a nickname. I feel like Phil Donahue. Do you remember Phil Donahue? My mom was one son, Sally Jesse Raphael. No connection to Mr. Rogers. How do you get this? It's duct taped. It is. I'm going to make it up. It's like I'm teaching, all right? I need an acoustic guitar. Is that VH1, shall we do? OK. I'm just going to go read it. Just imagine you're holding a flashlight with a dull battery, his father had told him. All you need is a few feet of light in front of you. Dayush pauses now on the top step before him a dark room, where dark rooms can join without walls to separate them, his imaginary flashlight sweeping across the space. Dayush knows from his times hiding under beds and inside closets that eyes are like their own flashlights. They adjust to the dark. They adjust to the dark. He makes his way left toward a frosty glare, probably a window. He's on the second floor of the museum, a museum he's been to once before, also with his father. But that time had been daytime. They had paid admissions, $1 for his father, an adult, 50 cents for him, a child. Their blue paper tickets were ripped in half by a man who didn't even pretend to be a lion tamer or fire breather or muscle man. It wasn't the same man who Dayush's father was talking to now, though, the security guard, Marco Gunkalves. Dayush's father, for some reason, called all men by both their first and last names, even to their faces. The full name unadorned with hello or good morning or how's it hanging was the typical greeting. Marco Gunkalves, his father had said, when Marco answered the three knuckle wraps on the museum's scarred wooden doors. Then Marco had silently ushered them both into the museum and locked the doors from the inside with a deadbolt as big as his leg. And that first time at the museum, Dayush doesn't remember why. He and his father had not made it to the second floor. Dayush points his imaginary flashlight at the wall and two eyes stare back. A portrait emerges framed of a tattooed man from the belly up. His beard covers the lower half of his face, even his mouth, and is echoed by the dark hair above his brow. It's like he's wearing a reverse Zoro mask. Every inch of his body and face is decorated with animals, elephants, zebras, rhinos, tigers, bears, horses, circus animals. Of course, thinks Dayush. Barnum would have hired him for his traveling circus. Even in this dim light, Dayush can see the man's relentless stare is at least as blue as his tattoos. Dayush moves along the wall. His eyes are adjusting to the dark, aided a bit by the nearly half moon he had seen above the Barnum Museum as they'd waited for someone to answer his father's knocks. The moonlight now seems to pool on the floor across from him. In the center of this room, taking up most of the floor space is something draped in sheets or heavy wrinkled blankets. Dayush wonders if it's an exhibit not yet revealed to the public or maybe an old spectacle under repair. He's standing before a bird, the head and long neck of a bird, at least inside the wall, its own half-exposed room. The bird looks like an ostrich, he thinks. He saw three ostriches last month at the beardly zoo. His mother said she thought he and his classmates were too young for a field trip to a zoo. Why not stay focused on sharing toys and pleasing thank you and tying shoes and basic bows? But she'd rummaged through her puffy pocketbook and her hand had come out with a lunch money and coins and a damp dollar bill. Dayush brushes aside this quick image of his mother who he's not seen in days. The stuffed bird now seems to be looking in a different direction. Where its eye blew as the tattooed man's but sadder, eyelashes nearly as big as feather dusters has settled its gaze somewhere else in the dark. On the swollen mound thinks Dayush, but doesn't turn around. Now he holds his hands out. He has his flashlight in one hand and fingers splayed on the other. He feels his way toward the darkest corner of the room, untouched by moonlight. He trips on something, something hard hollow, a wooden box he thinks on the ground. Its top darkly reflects the room's ceiling, a gauzy tangle of planets and stars. Dayush gets into a crouch, taps at the lid, it's glass. He studies it, thinking he'll see his own reflection if he stares long enough. He can glean the box's size and shape about as big as the coffin he saw at his grandpa Yosef's funeral last year. He peers harder inside, maybe an old tree trunk sawed in halves, he can't tell. Laughter downstairs, laughter after arguing. He knows the sound, but this laughter is light and so the arguing must have been light too. It calms him for a moment, the voices of Marco Gunkalves and his father wafting up toward him. Maybe they're talking about glass or donuts. Dayush used to think his father had been a donut maker. He worked for the city as a glazer, at least until he lost his job, quit the job, according to Dayush's father, lost the job, according to his mother. Either way, he knew his father was a glazer for the city and once as if to prove it, Dayush's mother had driven herself in Dayush to where his father worked after his father had been late with child support. Inside the building on the fourth floor, they found a room filled with laughing men. They were smoking cigarettes around a big table, their mustaches dusted with white powder. On the table were several boxes of donuts, jelly, crawlers, all fashioned and glazed. Dayush knew his father must be the one who made the glazed. He felt proud of his father in that moment. His beard not dusted with anything, laughing and back slapping with his work buddies over their sugary labor. But his father worked with glass. Some of the other men his mother explained after Dayush had asked in the car if he could try one of his dad's glazed donuts. Worked with electricity or plumbing or plaster. But his father was a glazer, G-L-A-Z-I. His mother began to spell then stopped. Dayush couldn't read not yet. Not words on paper anyway. On the first floor of the museum, Dayush had examined Barnum's personal letters and rubber stamps, pens like little swords, his wooden toothbrush. Horse here, Marco had whisper yelled at Dayush when he saw him examining the specimens under glass. Brushed his teeth with horse here. Weird, huh? There were a couple overhead lights on the first floor. The museum must have allowed Marco to keep those on during his shifts to read dime store paperbacks or just to send a warning to any potential museum thieves. Dayush had wished the lights could have been dimmed so that the yellow paper Barnum wrote his letters on could truly be gazed at, admired for the way the script looked like little ocean waves in the distance as if you were standing on the docks peering out at Long Island Sound. Dayush had wanted to feel the texture of Barnum's top hat with his eyes. The hat made of gray pool table felt or maybe the fur of a rabbit and as tall as a kindergarten chair. He had wanted to admire Tom Thumb's walnut-shaped horse carriage without having to squint at it. The golden boots without the glare. Thumb's boots reminded Dayush of his baby's shoes, his booties as his mother called him, but she'd bronzed and displayed on top of the television set before they moved out and away from his father. Dayush knew that Tom Thumb was called a midget and had married Lavinia Warren, also a tiny person. Each fall, the city held a festival capped by the Wingding Parade, celebrating the life of in the lives orbiting PT Barnum, Bridgeport's most famous citizen and one-term mayor. School children were taught the basic facts of Barnum's larger-than-life career and once they reached the third grade, they were allowed to compete for the titles of Little Mr. Tom Thumb and Little Miss Lavinia Warren. The winners getting to ride aloft a parade float and wave as cheering crowds threw them rice and flowers and cotton candy. That's how Dayush imagined it anyway. He had never been to the parade. He imagined after the parade getting to ride the walnut-coach-in-carriage beside his crushed Jody, freckled under her white bonnet. He wondered if the walnut would turn back into a regular carriage if they didn't make it home by midnight. Beside the golden boots was what looked like a slice of dirt encased in glass. Dayush had looked for worms, wondered if this display was a piece of Tom Thumb's backyard where his children played on their tiny swing set. Cake, Marko had said, startling Dayush, not by the word, but by its blunt utterance. It was like Marko was speaking to another adult. He was, Dayush realized. Wedding cake, Marko said, leaning towards Dayush's father. Over a hundred years old, Dayush's father then whispered something to Marko, something about taking it in the face. Marko donkey laughed. Dayush had a quick flash of a photo he'd once seen of his parents' wedding. His father pushing a white piece of cake toward his mother's closed eyes, her pursed no lips. He had no idea a piece of cake wouldn't rot after a hundred years. He'd stared until his father had told him to go upstairs, go explore. How many kids get to see this place at night? He said he and Marko Gunzclaves had some adult things to discuss. He'd already mentioned the flashlight idea, of course. Then as Dayush had rounded the first loop of the stone spiral staircase, his father had called out, or a lightsaber. But Dayush doesn't want a lightsaber. His father keeps insisting that Dayush loved Star Wars, but he only liked it okay. He carries to school the Han Solo lunchbox as his father got him, but only to be grateful. And because his mother said they couldn't afford a different one. She puts his tuna sandwiches with miracle whip and his apple and chips in the tin lunchbox, even though he qualifies for free lunch because she says he is going to be big and healthy. She used to say, big and healthy as your dad, but she hasn't said that in a while. Dayush liked the black hole much better than Star Wars, but no one else at school thinks so. And he's afraid to tell his father. His parents had let him pick out his sister's name when they couldn't think of one. Dayush chose Leia after Princess Leia in Star Wars because he thought it would make his father happy. But his parents spelled the name wrong on the birth certificate his mother later admitted, and Dayush wished he'd named his sister Kate after the scientist in the black hole. His father loved Star Trek even more than Star Wars, the old shows, but also the movie they just saw last week. But he didn't even comment on the black hole after they'd gone to the theater together to see it and then went afterward as usual to the Greek diner on Boston Avenue. There's a mirror at the diner, at the counter with the stools that spin where the cops in who Dayush's father calls the old timer's sip, where the donuts in apricot and cheese danishes are displayed in round glass cases and the coffee is poured and poured by Lucy, the owner, and her breath mint green dress tied with a white belt. A mirror above the toasters and gleaming milkshake machines that is as wide as the diner and reflects everything happening behind you. This is where Dayush and his father like to sit. As much as Dayush likes to sit with the grownups and listen to their coated banter about riffraff and unions, excuse me, union dues and the mysterious price of oil, he loves to steer deeply into that other vista, the diners behind him and the rows of red cushioned boots, the coat racks and hat racks, the ceiling fans whirring like helicopter blades in slow motion. Dayush is looking at his own mouth. It's open just barely and he sees the front tooth that has a chip in it and behind him in the mirror, he's now standing before some sort of creature hangs from a rope in bars of light or strips of darkness, a cage. He can't turn around. He looks again at himself in the mirror. It's shaped like a harp and the bottom part of its frame is decorated with two dancing figures and flowing hair and gowns. There's an American flag seared into the dark brown wood beneath them, between them. Dayush begins the pledge of allegiance in his head, a chant they have begun to say together each morning at school. He tells himself he's at the sink back home brushing his teeth before bed with the bug's bunny toothpaste which tastes like creamsicles up and down, not side to side, little strokes, lots of little strokes, like Dr. Dinkus had taught him at the dentist's office. But there is no more home, not the one on Monroe Street anyway, not the one with the room he shared with his sister, Lea, who calls him Dezu, and the room his mother and father shared, half of it filled with hammers and mouths and splintered window frames his father had bought at garage sales and promised to repair and sell. Now home was wherever they could sleep that night. His mother's co-workers' couches and spare mattresses or her old friend June's beach house in Milford with its mildewy sun porch were the marshy motel under the interstate overpass where the one pay phone dangled broken on its cord by the ice maker. We're as home now with his father, for Dayush at least, now their parent has told him of this plan. His father had picked him up from school last week, something he'd never done before and they've been together since, doing all the things they usually do together on weekends, baseball card shops, the movies, the new video arcade in Westport, the laundry mat where his father sits hunched over sci-fi novels, while his one load of clothes spins and spins and Dayush plays asteroids. Or Dayush's favorite place, the pet store in Trumbull. But now they go to these places or other places only at night. In the daylight, they stay inside his father's mother's house near the GE factory where his father used to work before he was a glazer. Before Dayush can remember with the heavy shades drawn. Dayush opens his eyes, realizes they had been closed for how long he doesn't know. He can't hear voices downstairs anymore. The creature hangs in the mirror before and behind him in its cage. The whole room's energy, its very physics seems to be drawn to this single point, this captive shadow. In the black hole, Dayush remembers the spaceship had been sucked into the black hole like some sort of celestial quicksand. Dayush had wondered how the black hole could be both nothing and something, an emptiness that could draw you toward it against your will, no matter how hard you fought. He decides to face the beast. There is enough light now in the room from his imaginary flashlight, his eyes, the moon, the rising sun, or just the heat of his daring for him to walk around the rumpled mound and stand before the cage. It's a monkey, the monkey's head anyway shrunken like a prune. Its face looks frozen in a scream, maybe frozen like a fish, like the cod and salmon at the grocery store, stacked milky-eyed on ice. And this creature's body is like a fishes from the torso down, or is it like a dolphins, a salamanders, the scales look old and diseased, torn, missing in patches. The tail, if that's what it is, coils like a fish hook. The whole thing Dayush thinks as he stands back from it, looks like a bait for some unfathomable deep-sea monster. Dayush laughs, he hears himself laugh, and then the floor behind him begins to move. And I was up there. Thank you so much. I have never been so interested in poetry as a form of art, even though my prose always ends up ironically poetic. But in just one week, Iroh has taught me that poetry can be as intense, invocating and beautiful, almost of all accessible in the light and simple language. Iroh Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship, It's Still a Ship, All My Heroes Are Broke, which was named one of the eight best Latino groups of 2017 by Rigo Bertho Gonzalez and Before Snowfall After Rain. Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he was raised in Miami and completed his MFA at Florida International University. He was also named one of the five Florida writers to watch in 2019 by the Miami New Times. He now lives in Brooklyn and is competing at Masters and Literary Translations. Please welcome Iroh Francisco. Thank you so much. Can you guys hear me? Am I speaking into the microphone? Cool. So I'm gonna read a poem about how much I hate Christmas trees, and then I'll read a bunch of poems about how much I hate Florida. So when I was in undergrad and a little bit of the time between undergrad and grad school, I worked at Home Depot in the garden section. And so when winter came, part of my job was to sell people Christmas trees, and that's one of the worst jobs imaginable. So it's called the O Christmas Tree. With my last $2, I buy a coffee to warm my ungloved hands, snow falling soundlessly onto my upturned face beneath the shadow of an enormous Christmas tree, a skyscraper raised overnight in Midtown, New York. I tried to fathom the flatbed it came to town in from some far northern Paul Bunyan forest. And remember the 18 wheelers full of classic Fraser Furs and wooly Douglas trees that I had to unload by hand when I worked at a Home Depot in North Miami. The trees were always stacked and netted like body bags from smallest to largest, making it as difficult as possible to unload. With the menacing 12 footers still waiting in the back after hours of dragging and lifting, dragging and lifting. That winter was cold enough to send the snow birds home, temperatures dropping to the upper 20s at night, and it was always cold in those refrigerated trucks. Though the sap that oozed from the trees wasn't quite frozen, and so it would stick to my jeans, hoodies, gloves, and that stupid orange apron leaving me sap staying from head to aching feet. This was after I graduated college when I was so broke I called out sick because I couldn't afford to put gas in the car that week to drive up to work and threw up from eating ramen noodles for four days straight. Never broke enough to pick up a penny off the street though, knowing damn well how worthless they are, not even pure copper, even Abe is embarrassed, casting aside ways stare to avoid eye contact. Those were the days when I'd come home broken and stare at my English degree hanging on the wall like a crucifix that never answered a prayer. I couldn't even afford a Christmas tree, not even one of those shitty plastic tabletop ones, and hated everyone who shopped at Home Depot for theirs, having to cut the netting and twirl tree after tree, only for them to say again and again, eh, I don't know, how about that big one in the back? And I hated them even more, hoped the tree they picked was full of spiders, even dead ones which often turned up in the frozen trucks with their eight glazed eyes multiplying the darkness, legs like dried pine needles, or maybe a stiff robin would drop down on their gifts as their children hung lights and angels from the branches, its beak parted in yellowed silence. I always imagined those creatures that turned up in the trailers as sad, strange little immigrants fleeing their homeland, smuggling themselves in the trees, the trucks, their homes destroyed but deciding to stay in them, seeing the semi-licensed plate and dreaming of Florida that legendary place only mentioned in the chatter of mandatory birds, though I was the only living thing ever inside the trailer, sweeping out the dead critters into the piles of pine needles, miniature funeral pyres. One night it got so cold that I considered setting fire to all the trees, watched them all light up brighter than that giant one in New York. I didn't quit that night, I just never came back, though I stood out there a long time, room in hand, fantasizing about the embers flickering like tinsel, the smell of roasting pine needles. And when the fire trucks finally arrive and police come and ask what happened, I wish them all a merry fucking Christmas as the fire jumps to the storefront and say this blaze is my gift to myself, the only one I could afford. Where's this one, this is a shorter poem. This is the thing that I like to do, this is like a prompt that I give myself, which is to write poems about reading other poets and kind of see where that goes. So this is a short poem about, it's called the Reading James Wright on the L Train. And James Wright's collected poems is called Above the River, right? So it kind of plays on that a little bit. Reading James Wright on the L Train. Below the river, Brooklyn bound, I hold his poems in one hand and the cold overhead bar in the other, reading to myself on the crowded evening train when a sudden heaving pulls me from the text. I look up to see a young man seated with his head lolling between his knees to the rhythm of the train. Yankee cat pulled low over his face, vomiting onto his shoes. Everyone scatters to the adjacent compartments, lifting scarves up to their noses as they exit. The vomit stretches like an evening shadow down one end of the car and I walk towards the other, laid down on an now vacant bench. The train sways lightly like a hammock. Beneath a sun marred window blossoming with jewels of frost, I begin to read aloud. That's a real thing that happened when I, before I moved there, I was visiting my aunts and they were like, be careful with the strange people on the train. And I was like, yeah, okay. And then this guy just started going off. This is a poem about how much I hate Miami Beach. So I grew up in Miami and strangely enough, there's a really great place there on the beach called the Betsy Hotel where a lot of great poetry events take place. But it's very strange because it's Miami Beach and it's such a bizarre place. And it's very hard to get to because it's like in the corner on the water and the traffic is truly horrendous down in Miami. And this also makes reference to Scarface, right? Because it was filmed down there on Miami Beach. This is called Magic City Rooze. Again, Miami's called Magic City, but I don't know why. I lived there for 23 years and it's still kind of mysterious to me. But it's Magic City Rooze. Miami Beach burns with the insatiable ego of a galaxy, bright enough to refuse admins to any stars in the night sky. I walk its neon grid past hotels and restaurants, sidewalk cafes that pulse with radio activity like the lanes of a pinball machine or a twilight zone town that's stuck in Christmas time, crowds made up of everyone I've ever hated talking too loudly or stepping on my shoes or both as I trudge to a poetry reading. Awful music spews into the street and I think this is how whales must feel about sonar, how it drives them crazy enough to try and defy evolution and crawl onto land, though not crazy enough to beat themselves here. To distract myself, I search for the motel from Scarface where Tony escapes with the blood of his chainsawed friend splattered all over him in a drop top speeding down ocean drive. Tony, dead face down in his living room without him like Gatsby laid out poolside. What is it with dreamers dying bloody by the water? Crossing 13th, I'm almost run over by a Ferrari red as the stop sign that ignored. I take solace in the fact that scientists believe Miami will soon be swallowed by the Atlantic like a child gulping his vegetables whole so he won't have to taste them and picture the neon being extinguished, this stupid Ferrari encrusted with shit colored barnacles. The idiot behind the wheel leans into the horn, the Blair masking his curses and mixing with the nonsense conversations floating up from the crowded sidewalk, the garbage pop blitzing out of cafe speakers, hostesses yelling out drink specials and frenzy desperation. But beneath all that, I hear another sound that trembles from across the street, waves pawing at the shore, the ocean mumbling its desire for the day that it will drown out all the lights and noise for good and let the stars return to this night sky. Oh, let it be soon, let it be soon. And then these poems are kind of a continuation of that one. It's a lot more about how much Florida sucks and climate change kind of things. So this is the opening poem of a sinking ship is still a ship, which is called Spring Break Forever. As you might know or not know, Miami is actually one of the corners of the Bermuda Triangle, which I think explains why it's such a strange place. Spring Break Forever. Perhaps lounging on the long corner of the Bermuda Triangle is why people don't see the swell, a magic shroud vanishing the obvious. Maybe the famous sun is too bright and blinding, maybe a little sand in their eyes blurring their vision, a little salt. Are the beaches more crowded this year? Soon, there will only be room enough for people to stand side by side facing the ocean's onslaught like those blindfolded before a firing squad. And still they'll say how nice it is to visit how beautiful all that water. This poem takes its title from a newspaper headline, so presumably it's true to a certain extent. And I wrote it in 2017, where we had a pretty scary hurricane season after almost 10 years of not being in any real danger. We had quite a few that didn't end up hitting us in South Florida, but you know, they kept kind of coming up and coming up. So it's called Ruins of earliest church in America discovered in Florida. Hurricane Matthew missed us, but really fucked up St. Augustine, tore out a shopping mall to reveal a 500 year old skeleton folded arms pressed against his chest, head facing east, staring down the storm that let the air wash over him once again. Is there anything more Florida than being buried under a church that will be buried under a shopping mall that will be ripped open by a hurricane named after one of the 12 apostles? All I know is I don't want to die here, but if I do bury me so deep that no one ever finds me, listen, I know you can't dig very far into the Florida ground, but please promise me that when your shovel breaks the final limestone and splashes dark water, you'll keep digging. I think this, where is it, hold on. Here we go. I think this is actually, it's not super long, it's like three pages, but this is like the longest poem I think I've ever written and I've been trying to write something longer and it's, I find it really hard. When I lived in Miami for a long time, I lived across the street from the airport, like quite literally, the Miami airport was just pretty busy. And I had, my room was, it was kind of nice because I had like this balcony so I liked this sliding glass door, but it was not very soundproof, right? So I was constantly having to deal. I lived across the street from the runways in particular actually, which was pretty terrible when you're trying to sleep. And then this bird, it must have been like some kind of mockingbirds that are living in the alley and it was making all this noise and it was actually like driving me crazy. So this is about that. It's called another sleepless night. A professor once told me a lot of dead birds appear in my poems and I wish I could add another here, but this one lives for now to torment me. New to this neighborhood, spending his nights on the electrical poles sprouting from the alley where the bums and drunks trudge through at any hour but never sleeping, seemingly screeching in perfect rhythm with his rapid beating of his tiny heart, if he has one. Maybe he's a nightingale, maybe he's Keith reincarnated, returned to sing all his choked down words, except they aren't words anymore, not after this long. They're just sharp sounds that poke holes in my sleep, not quite music. I stagger out onto my balcony, tired and angry and scan the wires for the bird, sweeping across the alley with every damn chirp, but see only the neon pink glow on the trim of the airport diner, still haunting the alley. It closed suddenly. I used to know when summer started by the sound of the owner's two sons throwing a ball around, the older one silently teasing his little brother who would complain loud enough to wake me for my attempted afternoon naps. So instead, I would watch them for a while from four stories up, tempted to yell at them to shut up, but smart enough to realize their parents couldn't afford a babysitter. On rainy days, when I'd sit at the counter, I'd see them in a corner booth quieter, one with a book, the other with an ancient Game Boy. The waitress would bring my breakfast without taking my order, regardless of where the sun was in the sky, refilling my coffee as she flirted with a strange hopelessness, which is what I feel now, sliding back inside for a fistful of coins to throw at this goddamn bird, knowing how unlikely it is that I'll hit him, hearing his shrill laugh as my pennies and quarters clink off the electrical poles and transformers and trickle down to the concrete like lost minutes, lost hours. At the very least, I'm glad those kids won't be out there tomorrow in the sunshine to watch me grogged through the quiet alley, collecting my change for another night. I told my roommate about that and he looked at me with some concern. But yeah, that was a really, like three in the morning, I'm out there in my back, throwing pennies at a bird I couldn't see, but I could hear. I mean, it was definitely there. Not crazy. This is a short poem. This is another poem about reading another poet, Hart Crane, it was really great. He died, he drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Florida. Kind of mysteriously, people don't know if he jumped off the boat or if he stumbled off or perhaps someone pushed him off. And of course, his famous poem is called The Bridge, right, it's about the Brooklyn Bridge. So this is a short one for him. This is called The Reading Hart Crane Enables. It's on the west coast of Florida. Reading Hart Crane Enables. I too have looked down from the Brooklyn Bridge and must tell you my reflection is just the same here in the waters of the Gulf. That is to say distorted, unreachable and it's rippling. People always ask, did you leap or did you fall? A question of agency in tent. I know the water never asked you this, the water never cared. I think just two, oh no, three more. This is another short one. This is called Smoking a Dead Friend's Cigarette. I found it bookmarking a Franco-Hara collection I hadn't heard of as I helped clear out your things. It's faded white, bright against the yellowing pages. Deep into this night when the hours mean nothing, I sit down on the trunk of my car and light up for the first time, let that burning tunnel through my insides, leave them smoldering in epitaph, coughing up a eulogy against my will. How far does someone's light travel? At what distance is this glowing in my hand no longer visible? Last two. This is a poem written after Yusef Kumanyaka. It's called Translating My Dad's Love Poems. So my dad's a poet too, and I thought it would be a cool idea to translate his poems into English, he writes in Spanish. I thought it'd be like a fun, you know, a father-son type of thing. And I'm very stupid and I forgot that my parents divorced when I was like nine and that he might write poems about that. And then I put myself in a situation when I was translating these poems that I didn't realize I didn't wanna read. This is called Translating My Dad's Love Poems. It must have been 98. My mom leaving for work. The first night she doesn't kiss my dad goodbye. He closes the door softly, walks slowly to his office and takes a hammer to the keyboard of his computer as though desperately trying to build something until the letters fly through the air, struggling to form the words he cannot. I watched from my childish quiet, unnoticed, unsure of how much time passes before he labors over the scattered keys, scooping them up with small hesitation like a man collecting seashells and striving to pop them back into place to remember where each one belongs. I am so much like my father and so I too, fear love, how I will inevitably fail it, mishandle it, let it fall from my hands, too fragile to survive intact. Years later, I think of him hunched over that keyboard, the same one he used to write the poems I'm now translating, bent over my own computer alone in my apartment, his words, my inheritance dimmed foreshadowing. He writes, today I will not think of you, today I will not think of you, today I will not think of you. Cool, so last one. It's another short poem, but with like an obnoxiously long title. Another poem from 2017 from that hurricane season. This was before, I think it was Hurricane Irma, which was like, I don't know how they measure hurricanes, but it was the physically the largest one that they've ever recorded, and it was kind of terrifying, the anticipation of that. Again, it didn't hit us down in Miami, thank goodness. But preparing for it was kind of scary. So this is called, on the eve of the largest hurricane ever recorded, my ex tells me she hopes I don't die, and I mean, like, whatever. There's a howling that barrels through the lonely static of night. I've got enough canned soup to drown myself and my phone lights up with tornado warning after tornado warning, an escort of destruction dancing around a three mile radius. Just now the power goes out like a deep inhale after a gut punch. This is unexpected. Your words, I mean, I hold them like a dimming candle, not enough for warmth, but it's something. In this darkness, I can at least allow myself this tiny truth. Thank you. Hi everyone. We have so much creativity, so much talent in one room. Today I was reminded with the presence of Christina, Marie Darling and Chris Campioni, that we are part of the same literary universe and wherever we go, we're gonna run into each other. I happened to run into Chris last year, two years ago at the Yellow Writers Workshop. And there's so much talent to share, there's so much knowledge. So while we're here, we have the privilege of getting a taste of what collaboration is like between these two. Christina Marie Darling is the author of 32 books, including Look to Your Left, The Poetics of Spectacle, which is coming soon in 2020. She conducted a critical study on poetry and silence in her book, which is forthcoming from Clemson University Press. Christina currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief for Tupilu Press. Tupilu Press. Tupilu Press, that's how you pronounce it. I can't pronounce it, I don't know how to pronounce it. Well, there you go. She's an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Review of Books, contributing writer at the Publishers Weekly, a staff blogger at the Kenyan Review, and freelance book critic at the New York Times Book Review. Our second part of the collaboration we have, Chris Campione, who is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland who was raised, I believe, in New Jersey. Yes, I did not write this part. He's the author of six books, including The Internet is for Real, which re-enacts the language of the internet as a literary installation. His selection of poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013. His novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece, This Body's Long I'm Still Loading, was adapted as the official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival. Chris is also the editor of Pank as you can see on his T-shirt. Please welcome these two collaborators. Well, thank you so much for the lovely introduction, and thank you all for coming out tonight to hear some poetry and prose. Chris and I are going to begin by reading from our collaboration, and then we'll both read a little bit of solo projects. So, yeah, without further ado. Yeah, I just want to thank everyone for being here and for inviting us. It's such a privilege to be among you all, and I only wish I had more time to spend with you all, but it's been a great two days, so. 7.37 p.m. Sunday, December 23rd. Strange to think of machines that way. I know the cold grip of confidence or how a forgetting must also be erotic. How I've always reached for a body made to last the fall. I'm told and I'm still telling this as cars part root four into soft focus. A point of Google Earth I've already reproduced from habit. I'm here again. A stretch of skin folding inward like prayers into a waiting palm. No one is expecting me for days or else I've forgotten who I am. I can still see myself there, dangling like oranges in grove. I'm the first person to make eye contact all night, rain sliding across my cheek to cut my copy like a secret river. A choice to remember or erase. Some people watch me and want to fall in love a second time. I want to say something always survives this, being what we call a witness. When I begin the story, the question of power seems inevitable. I don't know how to open that box. Can't seem to turn the key without breaking it apart. I want to keep driving in the same way I want to tell you the truth and still be able to look at you straight on. At night, the fell trees, the telephone wires, a field of dead aster that goes on for miles. Which is to say, I am a lip match and I'm trying to keep myself from turning up the heat. You see, there are only two kinds of weather. Yes, the storm sirens are pitched at a higher frequency and now the same dream. You are standing there with a book in your hand saying over and over, I thought I knew you. So it was such an honor and a delight to collaborate with Chris. And one of the things that I so enjoyed about working on our book project was that I got to create a kind of persona and it was fun to see that change and evolve as we wrote. So the solo poems I'm going to read are also persona poems and one of the great joys of the persona poem is that you can say and do things that you can never say or do as yourself. So these are called from a collection called Dark Horse and all of the poems are written in the voice of a female speaker named Jane Dark and everybody has hobbies. Some people like knitting, some people collect stamps, Jane Dark steals husbands. So this first piece is called Jane Dark Speaks of Culpability. Even then the entire city was filled with lifeless clocks, a divided highway leading nowhere, which is to say you should never have purchased a ticket from that woman inside the glass box because this is what happens on the night trains. Of course, you cannot determine the nature of our association without first entering the room. It is impossible to say what you would do here until you have eaten the last of the pomegranates yourself. Little grace note, little teenage paramour wearing some quarterbacks leather jacket. Let me address your question directly this time. The hatchet in the yard still sings against the butcher's block. Are you even listening? The break in my voice, the way every word catches in the rafters like dead game strung on a hook. So I never promised you guys happy poems. This next piece is called Jane Dark Gets What She Wants. The nightingales aren't everything after all. Now the other wife stutters in her chair. Her voice no longer cleaves like a silver flute in a darkened room. It's all iron and rust, a church bell waking alone in the tower. But there are some things even I would never say aloud. Flower bed, knife, epithelamean because I haven't a word for the little gate between heartsick and holy that startling numbness that begins in the hands. And so a rifle fires again in the distance. The marksman impatient with all this talk. What does it mean to think of nothing but the weather? The marble statues in Trastevra or those little boats near the lakeside in spring. Here my every thought is a stalk of thistle tearing through the snow, which is to say the air is thin and the garden flowers just won't take. Stop with the questions. Let me undo the lock and I'll show you what's inside the drawer. The ring on my finger is so lovely. You'd never know what else I'm holding in my hand. Facts about the shore. The whole time we're speaking, your other wife traces figures in the sand. Little hourglass atop Rousseau's desk. Logic and its raptures. How cold the light is as it strikes the coast. The insides of the flowers have gone dark and now their mouths are frozen shut. Dear impossibility, dear husband, this is your atoll. A low sky murmurs just above us and none of the ships will ever make it back to the dock. Snow falls on the other wife, on your small white boat, on the ice. When you look away from the ocean, I do my best to hold still. I try to ache more beautifully. So another thing that you guys probably need to know about these poems, there's a lot of interpersonal violence in the collection. You see, you know, rifles, fistfights and all of that kind of thing. And this is because Jane Dark and the other wife are actually roommates. They're sharing a living space. So that's why there is so much contention in these poems. And so this poem takes up that concern. It is called The Sadness of Small Houses. The other wife is always present, counting the buttons down the back of my neck. Husband, you know the coldness of her hands, the break in her voice, her stop and start. When the diamond is kept in a separate box from the ring itself, its theft remains a perpetual possibility, but on most days an abstraction. From the balcony she must have been beautiful, white on white on white. When will they unlock the door? The violence of a room is in its plainness, the dark cloths on the arms of the chairs, the stutter of new foliage against the glass. Husband, you know the sounded dish makes when it shatters. When I say your name, the women, one by one stop breathing. So a lot of these poems take up the idea of, you know, testimony in court as one of their considerations and one of their rhetorical situations. So this poem is a poem in three parts that engages that idea of justice in the courts. It's called a song pulled from the throat of a sparrow or a love story. One, Jane Dark reminds the husband, you didn't expect the house to be this quiet. What I meant to say, the table is the same table as before. From the trestle, the cracks in the glass must have been beautiful. When will you stop staring out the window? There are some things you don't need to see. For example, the way the ice has gathered on the roof of the hot house, the dead bird that waits in the hollows of the tree. I know you still think of the other wife, but you must understand her dress is just a dress. The snow is just snow. By now her fingers are as hard as the little spoon you use to scoop sugar for your tea. You see, I haven't a word for the sound your mouth makes against the edge of the cup. Husband, the silence of these rooms is known only to us. Sweet accomplice, radiant hostage. In the mind there is a city. When you say her name, all the lights go out. Two, Jane Dark warns the other wife. Let your bells ring in some other chapel. Never steeple hung, never touched. They were meant for an island, an inlet, the very bottom of that ever widening lake. Which is to say, there are a few things you still don't know. That there was one before you, her dress a stalk of thistle that was always catching in the trees. When we buried her, we did it properly. Sealed in a glass box with only the bouquet, she could no longer speak, let alone search for the keys to the kingdom. You've probably guessed that her mouth was like a pair that had already been plucked. Her mouth was a bird as though it's a question. And because she only dreams in shades of white, her gown had all but disappeared into the landscape. A line of smoke that rises from the trees. You see, the violence isn't in the action. It's in the duration that Dove still caught in the thistle heart of a burning bush. What I meant was, I didn't even enter the room. The latch on the door was already too hot to touch. She speaks his name as though testing its truth. The vowel still lodged in the hollows of her throat. And because that night she asked for him and asked for him and asked for him, there was no one to tend the fire. So the entire forest lit up beneath a sheet of ice. And so every one more poem, this is called, for once, Jane Darn defines violence. In order for the trick to work, you can't just linger over the woman's hair. Or the sound her nails make as they strike against the wood. Husband, you know the spell that's hidden in her wrists. The cruelty of each one of her dresses because she fastens them with a hook. Which is to say, you must make a decision not to think about the other rooms. The cabinet snaps shut and when the little door opens, there is a murder in every corner. That night we met, I imagined our house differently. Now I've started another fire, but nothing seems to warm the floor beneath my feet. Husband, there is a word for this kind of guilt and it sounds exactly like your name. Beautiful motive, light blazing in the courtroom. Remember not to speak of her, even when you are alone. You never know who might be listening on the other end of those wires. And so without further ado, I will turn things over to my colleague, Chris Kinden Yoni. So please join me in welcoming him. Yeah, just another round of applause for Christina. Yeah, so I'm going to just start with a sequence from the Internet as for real. The startup screen of a computer's operating system always reminds me of the face. A flickering like flesh, stir-frying in grease and oil. Some relatives are meant to be imagined years before they die. They exist there, in the same room, wearing the same clothes, moving in a similar manner, like a re-room. Having left so much family in places I had never been before to grow up in North America, I had a lot of relatives who were relatively unrelated to me. By blood, at least. These North American relatives even adopted false titles to preface their real names. Aunt Marie, Uncle Joe. But they were as real to me as my own relatives, my own breath and sweat. It's being touched about touching or is it more about feeling? And in feeling something, feeling something the same as someone else, to say feeling something at the same time that someone else is feeling it too. It is always something I am thinking that puts an end to something I am feeling. And what does it pose to accept the ability to hold onto an emotion while at the same moment making a move toward another? There is no question mark because there's no question. And what I want always is a fluid movement. And what I want is all the time to hold both. Before and every after. My favorite films are the films in which there are no real actors, no plots, no character expositions, no ground situations, no inciting incidents, no dialogue or narration. Only the thin silence of a racer. One slide replacing the one before it. The mirror of its audience, we're not so much seeing things so much as we are seeing things replace themselves. In this way, seeing and not seeing can coincide. Nothing happens in these films except everything. Opening the first page of the book is like looking at your lover for the first time or like looking at yourself for the first time in the eyes of your lover. It is a well documented fact that before first dates with future lovers I would make them a mixtape. I discovered that by simply altering the arrangement I could elicit different emotions in the body of a listener to say nothing of my own. Moods built for mass consumption and easy duplication. Moods built like books of recipes not really and no longer interested in writing books meant to be read but in writing books meant to be written. The best books can be read front to back but even especially from the back to the front. To write this book one would have to insert something at exactly the midway point which is always moving and edging over or away. In the book I'm reading I underline a passage that says forgetting is among the most beautiful things that can happen to the human brain so I can remember it. I like to forget my lover on occasion because everything that has been forgotten or become unrecognized becomes almost instantly more beautiful and in becoming more beautiful it makes me want to remember you more. So I'm going to read a bunch of, I guess there's sort of self-correspondences I've been keeping a notebook for three years. The first one is titled How Not To Sweat Men. A prayer to the God of open mouth commutes. The God of transfer is available at the NEM station. The God of remembering this at 1.33 a.m. or of learning French by the repetition of opening one's mouth. On exits there are not enough verbs to spare on openings. I like to close my eyes and picture myself there, there, there. Which is to say all of the above and not either and also something I like to say to comfort someone suffering from some fundamental lack. All failure as failure of the imagination anyway and anyway there is music in every failure if you listen hard. I like you. I'm a sinner with feelings. For the sins I have committed are sins of feeling. I have felt myself grow into it in every act. Like you I'm learning how to sweat like all the rest of Paris. Which is to say to learn how not to sweat. Men dapper in 95 degree weather as I stretch my body toward relief. Like you I'm relieving myself as I write this. In the way that allows me to escape my body as I write. Which is why I write in the first place. Like you. Elsewhere I spend 40 euro on a 10 minute ride. Elsewhere I spend a whole morning admiring my mustache in the mirror. My body is pleading to host the guest of masculine flatness. Elsewhere my insistence on reorienting hospitality. The art of remembering a dream and not being able to distinguish dream and reality. In reality this correspondence takes place before place. The buffering of position or its hiatus as I hurdle toward a creationary before us. In reality isn't presence only sequence of migration through one's past. This very moment on the bus to body. I caught myself thinking about Marseille so unable to tell whether I'd rather use it on my body or in my body. Knowing sometimes I like to only watch it melt. I'm nothing if not persistent. Fantasy. Idea I exist in everything my mother ate before me. Everything my father tried hard to dance to on a street corner in a Santiago I can only name and text. Idea that I am accumulation of the ghost stories my mother witnessed as a child after passing the Atlantic before passing them on. Could I be ocean to what is often only dreamed of or long for as a second hand keepsake? Could I be my father's cigarette in a picture? Could I be his silence? Any time anybody asks why don't you go back I shrug my shoulders. Tell them I'm waiting for my father. I'm waiting for my father to answer that same question. I don't say can you imagine what it feels like to leave and not ever not ever return. I don't say can you imagine the faces of your cousins and uncles and aunts. Can you map their faces from memory because it's been over half a century since you saw them in the flesh. I don't say memory is another form of death. I don't say my father will die without stepping foot on the street on which you learn to walk. I don't say he'll never not ever go swimming at Siobhanay again. We're fly fights in the rooftop at the high rise in the corner of San Mesillo and Clarín. The sky above or below. A throne of seba from which to hide and seek. I don't say that when he left, Aparación Pedro Pan would go on and go on to become the largest migration of unaccompanied minors in the history of human passage. I don't say what he cannot say because I know silence is another word for a bomb. I don't say what I know but I've always known that I feel it too somehow. Like a cut that stops bleeding but saves a scab with untouched flesh once was. Mom, my mom. My mom was allowed to go back in the 90s after the Walls fell. Always plural. But no one ever asked me about that part of myself anyway. Which makes it easier and also hard. Easier because I can stay silent. Hard because I can stay silent. Everything you know is worth repeating. Everything I write out I write twice. The interrogation of strangers. Historical time versus personal time. Drizzling the damp sand. I want to say but I'm angry now. I'm bitter. And my face, my face is something I can feel just by looking at the person who's asking. So I say nothing but nothing. I don't say anything but smile as it's my custom. And I do it by burying my teeth. And I do it by wondering where, oh where are the great forgetters. I say my father took to America so much he never wanted to leave. I don't say America took my father in his arms and crushed him. I came out like pus from a poison wound. The ribs of the United States. I don't say I ever liked it as if I ever had, you know, the choice. This one's a little lighter. Thank you. Deja vu in a dream. Sitting before the moon in the age of photography. Exited on view through September 26 and 2019. Legs dangling over such well-worn steps. The smell of meat being raised or rising. The sound of Chinese and the clip a camera makes when I'm recording. I always wondered how people in movies can brush for so long without spitting or letting the phone juggle out from their lifts. In other words, my favorite part about pinball is the release at the starlight or under starlight. The first wish I make is to be held or to hold a melody. My rhythmic succession of parts in relation to a whole. Singing from the top, the very top of my tiptoe so I can reach all of my body in the mirror, the lower half below the sink. I lean upon the way I lean into certain distances. Thinking how, when I vacuum, I can be aggressive. There's something I want to say about wanting to get under things. To bring them out and then to watch my traces disappear. Hair, sweat, and even skin. Something that can't be seen. Something seen that can't be considered. The knowledge that photography was invented to map the visible surface of the moon. My favorite part of any day is when I can hold the sun and the moon in the same gaze, knowing I need to always not have either but both and to be simultaneous. Fantasy. Not to be Apollo but Apollo's muse. Outside the dream I'm only listening to fear or music. Some veins of certain leaves. A means of transport and feeding. Guilty of a certain tendency to use my mouth like a motherboard. Standing up like this can be a miracle. Because first we're animals and then we're human and then and then we're machines. And I kind of wanted to end in the spirit of correspondence and collaboration with I think it's amazing, amazing collaboration and anonymous collaboration that took a little over 25 minutes last night at this really fun, generous workshop that Christina and I led on collaboration correspondence. No. I had a dream the other day where I told a correspondence. A woman I had met only thrice that, do you think I don't know the meaning of my own name? She was visibly shaken by the unexpected screaming. Later I painted on the wine. And on the olives. Art. A voice cannot be a shape. Is silence not power? Lately I've spoken of the earth so little. There have been too many genocides, too many mass shootings, too much tribal warfare. I'm stuck in humanity. I fear I am all its sins. Is it strange that my first memory of desire is doubting wants? Most mornings I wake up filled with the sensations of the world. My body is alive. My mind a sunset drenched lagoon. In the morning there are no worries. Only the desires of the body and the hand. Like a ballerina with a broken spine. I can feel everything then. Only in the evening do I feel nothing. No emotion. Only the burden of correspondence and to-do lists. Then I go to sleep. I will have invested in art and divested myself with every penny that I could find. I would say, write it again, Sam. Yesterday I realized that I'm too hard on myself. Perfection is a ghost. Who haunts you? Yesterday I realized that other people fear me. You bring out the ghosts of desire and doubt in others. Desire has always sounded more delicious to me than doubt. But these days, after many years, I'm beginning to wonder. I try to look at the sky at the same time. The same moment every day. Record the variations, but also the invariable sameness. In this way, I understand the difference between an olive and an art is only the glare of the streetland which hides my face from view. My neighbors, even the ones I can only imagine, tell me I don't look like my name. They tell me I look like someone else, and I wonder if I look like someone else where have I gone? And I wonder if naming can be another kind of death. I know that I feel differently in the mornings than in the evenings. That the pleasures of the hand can often keep me up till dawn as they are now. I am writing of the future. This is mine to do with. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Chris, Christina, Ariel, and Justin. I wanted to remind everyone that all of their books are for sale from the college, Georgia BTFA, and Uka Makra, at least halfway. It will be your host, and she will help you buy those books. And please, stick around for the author signings. Say hello to all of our featured writers. And thank you for coming.