 Hello and welcome everybody. Thank you for coming to today's program, a very special poetry reading with authors Monica Modi and Sophia Naz. I'm John Smolley, a librarian here at the General Collections and Humanities Department of the Main Library, where we have tens of thousands of volumes of poetry in 41 languages. Before we get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a few of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homelands of the Ramatrisha Lone, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatrisha never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatrish community and by affirming their rights as First Peoples. As you know, April is the coolest month because it's National Poetry Month, so I want to just mention a few of our upcoming programs. This Thursday, author Morten Paley will be giving a talk in this very room at 6 p.m. on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. That will be an illustrated talk on Sunday, April 21st. Next in the afternoon, we'll be screening two documentaries on poets, The Poetry Deal on Diane de Prima and The Life and Times of Alan Ginsberg. And the following Thursday, next week, we have a program facilitated by San Francisco Poet Lauer Emerita Kim Shuck, which will feature poets Dino Rod, Tanish Kaur, and Manaz Badiheon, who will be reading from their recent works. And we'll wrap up the month with the Haydashbury Literary Journal. Poetry preserves 44 years of vital verse. They will present a reading featuring some of San Francisco's finest bards. You can learn more about these programs by picking up one of these flyers on the table over there or one of our library newsletters. You can also visit our website, sfpl.org, the online events calendar there. Please also help yourself to coffee and cookies on the table. So this ends these preparatory announcements. Before I turn the microphone over to our guests, I'd like to just say a few words of introduction. Monica Modi is a poet, scholar, educator, and author of the books Wild Finn, Bright Parallel, and Kala Pani. Her writing is one awards, including the Sparks Prize, the Zora Neale Hurston Award, and the Total Award for Creative Writing. Sophia Nance is a bilingual poet, artist, editor, translator, and author of Bark Archipelago, Pointillism, Date Palms, and Peripheries. She has been nominated twice for the Pushkar Prize in 2016 for Creative Nonfiction and in 2018 for Poetry. Please give a warm welcome to Monica Modi and Sophia Nance. And Monica, please come up. Thank you for the introduction, John. And it's so great to see everyone. Thank you all for coming on a Sunday afternoon when there is a lot happening in the city. So I wanted to begin by reading from a book that I don't usually read from these days. It's Kala Pani, my first book. And I wanted to read this, read a little bit from Kala Pani also because the San Francisco Public Library just recommended it amongst its spring picks, the San Francisco Public Library General Collections. So I wanted to start with this text and, you know, it's written in the form of screenplay. And I'm reaching for words here because Kala Pani, you know, it's a text that doesn't let me find adequate language sometimes also, right? So it's written in the form of a screenplay. And what I'm going to read to you to begin with is something the fifth world traveler speaks. And as I was searching for a selection, I realized that, you know, some of the teams in Kala Pani permeate my work even now, although in many different ways. For instance, the team of transformation, self-transformation. So the fifth world traveler. One day, same shape and other shape rode their boat to the center of the lake. A single lotus bloomed. It must be a magic lotus, open petals, skylight. They circled it, trying to memorize its curves, running their hands in the air around the light. Long exposure camera, minute and a half, click, sky, blur, boat, click, blur, shapes, vertical and horizontal, background and foreground, inner and outer, income and expenditure, elemental and artificial, candles and cellophane, water and film, scalp and wheel, first and second and third. The lotus's reverie was interrupted by a vision. The lotus had not long been a camera, but it was not offended at all if some still saw it as lotus. It remembered its early experiences with color, how it first learned to adjust its lenses and inward gaze of total concentration. The first time it managed to shrink its focus until everything looked small and sharp and precise, dissolved. Yet it did not like thinking of the past. When it did so, something severe rose within it. A memory of sorts, slender and stony, of a refusal that had squealed and refused to go away. But time changed it till it shuffled and shamefully melted away, no resistance at all, into something mucky, this self that was not compact, nor instant digital SLR, TLR, not even pinhole. This self, more properly, a plant, botanically, nilumbo, nusifera, symbolically, taintless. And the payoff of the identity it had acquiesced to was nothing more than it was now easy to be a camera. The photojournalists who had first called the lotus into a camera continued to think that everything was, as it always was, same shape and other shape, reminisced, self-absorbed, like a flower. Thank you. I'll read another brief excerpt from Kalapani, and this is in the form of a newspaper story, or rather it is a news flash. And people who are living in these times, that is all of us, might recognize some of what this book presaged. News flash. The media, who are not often surprised, said they were surprised, at sources having sent them a picture of the new government brand, accessorized with several captions, such as, fascism hard at work, and endearing portrait. Why freedom of expression will prove to be an ordeal for you? Homage to our new values of cowardliness. How to cripple thousands of lives and limbs? Citizens were asked to stay calm and light-hearted, while the new government stripped the pictures of the dangerous properties. Contorted face of the revolution looked back. Its masts had surrogated a ventriloquism act. This will be known in history as an act of indiscriminate transparency. The illusion has been lapping up all the sensory information that comes its way, transmitting them as popular visual and auditory stimuli. Beeps and flashes emanate either from some location or from another location. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. This is not a flash in the pan. Reliable resources confirm our glasses are quite full. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I think of San Francisco as my Garmbhoomi, the place where I kind of became myself, or the place where I learned to do work that matters as one of my favorite four-figures, Gloria and Saldua, I would say. I lived here for almost 11 years, and I moved to the Central Coast, Santa Barbara, Shumash lands, six months ago. And this morning I was walking around a little bit and recognized so much that I was familiar about the rhythm of the green ones, the plants, the rhythm of everything, the energy running under the earth, right? So I wanted to start us off with this invocation from my book Bright Parallels, still thinking of Kalapani. The invocation starts that I exist only as a speck on your bloodshot eyes, but I'm willing to sweat. Ancestors, when I see the least, I'm closest to you. That I have forgotten to praise you, but without this praise and this knowing, I'm nothing. That sleep runs like sweat off my face and awake. I'm inviting you to come visit me, come visit me, and make my heart hospitable. Make my heart soft and fierce. Make it so alive that any animal that wanders in would know its home. Thank you. Deep ear to ground and flowers growing like fingers into sky, beckoning. A heart comes out of sky as blue as love with a skein of tremors opening its eye to us. And heart sees heart like a beckoning, like furred cheek meeting in sorrow in trance. Like roundness of drops from eye imprinted with flowers and all that is moving on earth, like current moving in water that is water that is body that is wind and sound that wind makes. That is bird calls you can hear. And all forms collect here on this ground. Ancestors beam their love at us. Ancestors like milk running on our faces and sound cups our faces and drinks us in sounds breath. We're breathing. We are elemental of deep inhabiting e in flame head thrown back like birds. When ash falls from our tongues, its own breeze calls out and we smile like morning about to sing itself into existence. I flip over an old leaf and in its venation a name, mine, love crawls like an infant. What was said was a name spell and leaf asked me to unhide. Who wrote us into leaves? Who can read us? Who held apart mouth of cave so we could enter like bears? Who called out to glyphs of light and walls of cave? Who filled our eyes with charcoal to see pain of others, of heart, of tiger? Who planted rice medicine, salt medicine, seed medicine? Whose songs tipped with metal of ash line our mouths? Who hears these songs? Who wrote them into existence? You live on wire like birds. Your old souls see us in the bead of your eye and thus unto wisdom we climb fences of a heart and wave in that vast ocean. Sheshnag uncoils. A time came when this was all that mattered. Breath hovers. Breath flows through your skin into mine. Sound breathing between us. Breath taking apart the word you just held. Breathing between your teeth like a dove. Breath melancholy and breath song. Breathing like an infant sunrise. Wind swept, smile. Breath stone fire, wind water. Breath's living texture coloring the mirror between. Breath lately sent a search party for one of its lost members. Breath caught like a bird in my entrails until two eyes looking at you in darkness are alive with murmurs, with a dream spliced open with a chasm. This feature of breath must have you puzzled. Can you not sense the diving part of pain in which I rest my claim to be swallowed by you? When I allow my breath to breathe, your fingers flutter. Some shapes back at me and finally I swallow the breath. Finally there is space around pain in the lungs and time runs like a swollen coursing, Eddie's. Thank you. And this one's for all the writers. It's called And Sometimes. When you begin to write, thought is merely redness on horizon that insinuates itself into your body like a dancing bear. It's teeth clattering with sounds of the dead that trickle into your belly and laugh their secret laugh. For it is wise to want to be born out of ferocity of need, out of skeleton bones and shark teeth, out of impelling, driving like electricity, intention into turbulence. So unscrew the mind and set it on the table. And find a feast. Other heads lowling. Images blinking their eyes at you and space to meander in if you choose. Unspoken butts its head against yours. Thank you everyone. And I'm going to read some poems from my newest collection, Wild Finn. And Wild Finn is a San Francisco book. It was not only published in San Francisco by Viewer's Press. The designer, the painting on the cover of the book is also by a San Francisco based artist, Ann Marguerite Herbst. And the first poem I wanted to read from this is something that really evokes for me the ocean here in San Francisco. Mouthfuls of joy. Ocean surrounds every time. In point of harmony, a focus emerges. Your own divine knowing breath and echo of distant ones. Their edgy hearts walk by your own desire filled song. Lip brims with rock and wind precipitates beginnings. Thank you. And then I think the next poem I'm going to read is called Makes a Difference. And the question it's really asking it, what does it take to write, you know, in the midst of war, in the midst of genocide, in the midst of killings, in the midst of torture and slaughter and brutality, right? So makes a difference. Times like today. I'm too sick and tired of being a poet. Losses stitch my tongue into clawed mouth. Tigers, stripes, washed white, linen my eyes. All my organs fold up. Can I let meaning scatter? Fragrant like raw blossoms, raw blood pooling into patterns, gestures commensurate with guidance barely perceived. Places where we are stuck, stuck again. Can I grow a flower? The move so our lips can utter songs of love and freedom. It is no grand leap between then and now. Bridge that brought us now was a shimmer. I felt earth tremble, surging with presence. Can I stay rocking in this moment of undecidability, not becoming anything at all? Is it easy? It is easy. Every season that turns brings us back to pit a dark moon folding into sun. I fold myself into time and scream until scream flies still tied to my throat. We swallow each other's bones. We swallow each other's blood. We swig and gulp until white blood cells find us in the center, raw. Nightmare changes into a vision of great beauty. Fire raises sweat off its face, consuming waste parts that long ago came undone. Bodies swinging from rafters, lassos of despair, throats on fire. We rub glass pieces along sides of fire and raise our cries and pull our hair out. Pain is tremendous, pain, staggers, deep cuts in skin. We let out a sleighing noise that shakes gulls off their perches. Who is to say what lay to roost under slaughtered bodies? Low and behold, rain fed my blackbirds. Showers of rekindling, I cried every night into their throats. I cried my pain till saliva dripped and it all tangled dark, swallowed us whole. We sat in it like raw ants. Eagle motions stopped at the center, body wet. Shower of blood fell from skies last night. Two small black birds fell on my roof last night. O skies, you keep bringing me death. Faith shatters again and again. I wrap it into little bundles and bleed with it. I mark its forehead with excess of love. In this time of grave despair, an eye opens and closes at the center, immeasurable filled with tears. Elders tell us of the many gates around the world that are opening, gates opened by great white wings of love, of sorrow. Each gate points straight to our hearts, that place where broken realities are woven. Sometimes skin, sometimes skin we think stops world and cumbers wind within. Alertness, we are small we think. Listening risks too much. Mind wants to possess every twirl of leaf in air, border condition, tense. Must keep out tremendous mystery, protect ourselves, redact body, guard its banks. Fear is old, practically a fossil. Ghosts have lived in her mouth as long as history. Ice congeals eyelids. She flakes at banks we try to cross. Immortality, not wisdom. Thick with forms, world. Dignity trapped in man-made, dirigible of colonial shame. World views that sliver off beingness, savage, civilized, subdued from speaking of those others. I keep them secret even from myself. Make it linear, we learned. World of straight angles between angles fall. I tried to tame what I was in contact with. It gushed back in my face. Skin has a million tongues. Thirst points to divine capacity. Hours to mingle out of porous self. Brushing my palm on tree moss. I sense myself as Noah entangled. Flash in body moving across. No longer compressed. Space swept with breath and void. What slips between lights it's mist. Rubicons darken. Flit with sharp longing. Faces in trees nod. This me human wakens to not much else. Just my rightful place in world. Fear will not keep us small and folded. We who are mysterium, tremendous. I'm going to end with a poem, Spirit of Regeneration, and I wrote it for a teacher and a friend who lives in San Francisco, well, half of the year in San Francisco, and I learned a lot about regeneration and spirit and magic from her. So, in some ways it is, you know, it's for San Francisco again. Spirit of regeneration. You say there is a crack in the world. We bring out our needle and thread. You say world is a forest on fire. We become wolves that shape rivers course. You say perfection. We continue to sing the great song that is always complete, knowing rising like dough through its notes as we sing. Need its living scale with our breath, will, living cosmos rearranging as we continue to sing. You sing of death culture. Into mud we weep, step, waist deep, howl our way into lone dark where beginnings wiggle, life nuzzles death as sister, double to self. You laugh at simple-minded hope. We let nature take us by hand, teach us, beginner's mind, small actions, smallest arc of flitting wings, tips, towers, change, cascading. You say aren't you tired? We show you recesses where we scoop commitment again and again, stores of long memory, bone and beak entangled in root of tree, watered with ash. Renewal flows again in cupped hollows. Spirit billows. You tell us not enough. We release to earth in adequacy. Earth herself wells up in our bones like water finds its way. Elbow deep in sap of life we mend life's web, partners to what is broken, what we will create aligned with all our relations. This world, it's ours to make, we say. Thank you, Aria. Hello, everyone. I'd like to thank San Francisco Public Library, John Smalley, and all of you for spending your Sunday afternoon with us. I'm going to read today from a book that's my latest, my fifth collection of poetry. It's called Bark Archipelago, and it was published right here in San Francisco. This is a poem called Undocumented. Unbecoming I, tooth loose from aerial root, slow hanging, consonant in the trafficked jam, man a hut, sound of self, startled reflex jerks open like a pickpocket. Tirchi, pirti, kirchi, kirki, fly, mouths, moths, out under radar of surveilled night casualties in weight. Two. One thousand and one dollars rolled up tight make the traffic stop. Nothing but a closed shave with ice, window to palm in the scheme of things, a hair to brush past, paper over paper, shreds the synapse, Xeroxing silo, fog the lens, ache her back, her Bombay bow, go round the bend to stay a trophy, sigh low, darling green card on board, off duty eating language standing up in the united tastes. E pluribus umami, ramen, ramen. Three. Forgive me if I mix up cartographies, black Thursday, white Friday, month to mouth, lease, February, New York City, in the middle of walk, don't walk. I'm lost looking for the amaltas blooming at Humayo's tomb. Four. At the traffic signal hallucinating an eight armed goddess Lakshmi atop her steel torso, the dots come to a head. Yellow, red and green bindis. No, my religion is not Hindi. Look closely and you will see photo negative elephants of prosperity. We sleep four under the table in basement slum. I was a doctor once. Sutra comes down from Sutra. I saw my future ghosts back handed this. This next one is called popcorn. The dental hygienist says popcorn is the worst as I tilt back between spit and suck. Gums feel like shrapnel in my mouth an explosive leaves soft flesh and hard crack. Decades since I left Kabul but could never understand strange English that walks about America. When you say it's the bomb, how is that good? It's the sensation, I reply, way sweet, salty, buttery, whiteness fills as you watch, chase or place go up in flames. Unopened kernels stay buried at bottom out of sight. Until stepped on she says lifting her pants to flash a prosthetic leg. Okay, this one. This is a long poem, a prose poem called blow hole. A word made flesh makes its own world. What worlds does flesh made into words dismantle? After the kill, she was secured to one of the boats where a rope passed around and through her tail. Then the harpoons and attached lines had to be removed. A difficult operation because the whale was floating on her back with the harpoons deep underwater. Once were mammals that came from the sea made landfall and returned back to mother water. Boyant is the air that escapes the twin bulbs of lips to echo a beautiful letter. Towed back to the ship by all the boats rope together in a long line upon arrival she was taken to the larbid side and secured with the head towards the stern ready for flensing the removal of her fat. A blank rams a blank on a pin down blank blank the asphyxiation takes blank minutes and blank blank seconds. Black begins with the letter blank as does blue. Next the body of the whale was forcibly extended rump supported by a tackle and drawn forwards by a stout rope. Head drawn in the opposite direction by means of the nose tackle. I was eight years old when a man beating an outglass drum in one hand led a large black bear by her bloody nose to our street. A band of blubber two to three feet wide lying between the fins and the head known as the Kent was used to turn the whale over. A system of powerful blocks and pulleys hanging from the head of the main mast was attached to the Kent by means of a hook. Many years later I saw a bride her nose pierced with a large gold hoop. There was no blood anywhere. The rope was then pulled tight by the ship's windlass raising the whale in the water. The whale lying belly up extended and well secured was ready. At this point the crew usually took a meal and a dram. Harpooners feet armed with primitive iron crampons to prevent them slipping climbed down onto the belly of the whale. Under direction of the spexoneer they divided the blubber into oblong pieces or slips by means of a blubber speed. The first slave ship arrived in the Americas in 1619, 402 years ago. A hook was then attached to the slip and drawn upwards by means of a rope and capstone progressively flaying the strips of blubber from the carcass. The slips weighing up to a ton each were winched onto the deck where they were cut up into one foot cubes. Once the belly had been flayed the whale was rotated onto its side by the kent tackle and the upper surface stripped. The lips were then removed exposing the baleen which was extracted in one mass. Once safely on deck the whale bone was split with bone wedges into further pieces. The word whale comes from the proto-Indo-European root bale to blow, swell. A heart swollen with kindness floats becomes bhala but bhala is also an ancient weapon, language, a double meaning bow. Once all of the blubber including the kent had been removed the carcass or kring as it was known was released to sink or to become food for bears, sharks and birds. The crowds are swelling onto the streets. They grow and grow each body a ripple. The gathering river quickens but more police are waiting their batons also swollen. To strip a whale of 20 to 30 tons of blubber would have taken little more than three hours. Mouth of sea, whale of syllables, dissolving, crusted in salt. Thank you. This is called weight. When my water broke it had no color, only heart race, a foreign sensation weighing anchor to plant, biology in geography, settling underneath flux, pacific note, sweet spot where you nest even now, taller by a head, sun flower. I watch the west go down in twin moons of your eyes. My eyes, dark circles, bead pain, staking claim to each sharp nail glossed in the daily feed. The sum, thing I am trying to pin top most, mind your man and tend a bean to grow and unto that line. Up end, yellow tape, white silo, flashing red, wearing blue, weight that comes to a head. Thank you. So, let's see, where did this go? Yes, this is called emergency room. Sound signature is its own indelible animal. The growl of the disconnected heart monitor on a flickering finger, neon seismographs of the quaking, slim, gleaming sliver of your body. Fish from a far away ocean hooked, clamped, injected and bald in the ping-pong of sonic graffiti. Language is useless, Rubble. Your tongue makes garbled syllables. My throat a three chord refrain. I and you and love over and over again. Thank you. Okay, so where was I? Yeah. This is another prose poem. It's called Nine Yards of Muslim. The beauty of a plain length of fabric is that it's free of the hierarchies of what's up and down, what's important and what's not. Each thread is vital to the integrity of the whole and the smallest loss irretrievably alters its character. A hole in the fabric makes a space, a space that's filled by whatever is available. If you hold it up to the sky, it's filled by a hue that is an oxymoron, wearing its bluest drape when utterly bone dry. Though she did not live anywhere near the sea, she felt its inchoate roar, an unnamed absence weighing on her from the moment she awoke. Something was missing from the air. The crow blacks, the traffic jam, the hawkers, the spitballs, the offal, the stray dogs, the comb and balloon vendors, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, load shedding, the pins in her hair, a weak left ankle, everything was there, except it wasn't. A cloth folded into flat layers, each thin as an amnion. If birth was transparent, was age translucent? She buried her face in the muslin and took a long, deep breath. A hundred years old, or at least that's what her grandmother had always told her. But Nani was gone, her death, a hole around which their lies were slowly stitching themselves. The darn thing, still chafing occasionally at the back of a throat, a placemat set out of habit. What to a woman is muslin, if not next of skin? In those days, it wasn't called muslin, but abiravan, flowing water. Over the years, Nani had carefully apportioned its riverine span. Two yards for an embroidered ead dupatta here, half a yard for swaddling cloth there. By the time a clumsy molotov cocktail landed in the courtyard of their house in Ilahabad, the flaming petrol-soaked rag fortuitously fizzling out in the fountain, it was abundantly clear that another river, baying for blood, was nipping at their heels and would soon rise above their heads and that there was no choice but to leave the land of their birth. There were only three yards left. Nani measured a hand span, bringing the fabric from her outstretched index finger to the tip of her nose, made a small snip, and tore off a yard in a final partitioning of the parent gauze. A split second, two hand spans, each half a grave length, the time it took to crest a continuum of water. This one's called border. Imagine I'm aging up a border where this side could not go there. Not that side, come here. If my right of passage wanted to kiss my left bereft giving lip, there would be a row, armed band of teeth, grandstanding, mouthing off to guard each mile, stone after stones, through no one left to mourn. Okay, so I think I'm going to read a khazal. This is called darkness after Agha Shahid Ali. Earth spin around the sun, Kashmir, where it was in darkness, while tyrants spin untruths, enact laws in darkness. Twin apples, her eyes blinded in paradise. Whose bite marks are these? Flesh knows their jaws in darkness. Oh cowardly assassins snuffing out the lights. Even Jesus did not bear his cross in darkness. You may ambush and kill me, bury all evidence, but a rebel seed plies its cause in darkness. Mothers of the disappeared have cursed your sleep. The last of your conscience gnaws in darkness. You are welcome to your skyscrapers, their glitter. Gnaws is anomalous fire, she thaws in darkness. Thank you. So, of course. Okay, all right. Okay, you're welcome to your skyscrapers, their glitter. Gnaws is anomalous fire, she thaws in darkness. So that was the last answer. Okay, can everyone else hear me? This is called B words. B words used to define and debase women, broad and babe and bitch. I like bird the best. How she nests, warm against, abreast one minute, gone the next. I am a creature of such piercing flights, such slow-filling quills. I am a creature of such piercing flights, such slow-filling quills. Thank you. Okay, so how am I doing on time? I think I'll read something called Body of Work. Body of Work, a poem in six parts. One, heart. While I was away, dirty dishes aped Mount Everest, zucchini grew monstrously inedible, while 200 cherry tomatoes sank into a desiccated fire. Delias died untimely debts, the swollen mailbox had a baby, loud bills cried, pay me, pay attention, a mirage dissolved. My skipping heart beat, I sank, a stone into the marriage pit. Two, feet. A woman stamped her feet in the desert, and a spring came bubbling up from the hot sand, the way I imagine your touch across the passage that separates us, a mirage, the science of heat. Why was she only a prophet's wife and not a prophet? And tired of knowing the answer to that question, the past doesn't hold water anymore. Three, elbows. What if these bony right angles were actually storm angels? I mean guardians of flesh and blood, not zither or lyre. Body boomerangs on point across a room full of eyes and the forecast of hands. What if these elbows made a thunderous fuss, made buss, both noun and reverb? Four, nose. Lord, Lord knows, Lord knows how to work these words, a bridge to where you don't turn up yours. Five, hands. My hands are pregnant, and they birthed a destiny of alphabet stars on a desert page. My pregnant hands say the night sky is white and the swiftly inked stars are black. The book of the patriarch warns against the poets, and I, a woman, she, she, danger, doubling, dribbling, dabbling juice from that delicious peach breach of Helios. The icebox is already empty, Carlos. Don't mess with my pregnant hands. They're sweetly sticky fingers. Six, eyes. Waking to a sensation of elevation, of rising into unnamed enveloping, not like weightlessness, but a subtle force exerting itself against my torpor. A voice emanates, seemingly from everywhere. Direction is a relative beast in the near darkness. What is the voice saying? Sound, syllables, and alphabets float past in air bubbles from whose throat? An o hovers near. I hook my fingers around its neck like a lover and swallow. A woman covered from head to tail with eyes in the shape of darting fish is looking at me. A woman with 9999 eyes, all seeing hands, all seeing strands, all seeing glands. Eat another letter, she commands, reaching into the gelatinous twilight for an almost full moon attached to a stick of stem and popping it in my mouth. It's just like a black-eyed pea. I'm a black-eyed pea, I exclaimed. Yes, she smiles. Yes, you are. Eat some more, and we will begin. Thank you. I think I'll read one last poem, which is called All the Water in the World. Just like an ocean has a current and an undercurrent, so this poem flows in two parallel streams, so I'll be shifting the tone of my voice to alternate between the two. Two parallel streams means I was thinking globally. I was... Bark Archipelago is a poem about basically dislocations caused by migrations, including forced migrations like slavery, and so there are two parallel streams which are global and also the undercurrent is personal, so it takes place on both canvases. Welcome. All the water in the world. All the water in the world, about 13 billion eons old water of tethys and new womb breaking. A crack, thin as razor wire, ran from the lip of the basin to its bottom, stray drops from her. Eons old water of tethys and new womb breaking. Turbid and limpid and frozen and gushing. Niagara and eerie and Indus and Atlantic and speaking of the basin to its bottom, stray drops from her. Skin that did not sink congregated there. Niagara and eerie and Indus and Atlantic and speaking of oceans, anonymous, numinous, snow flakes falling silently as hair grazing ground. Skin that did not sink congregated there. An immigrant moss, water, ate air. Flakes falling silently as hair grazing ground, still secrets of the drowned, undoing time, abiding in the tides, march of middle passages. An immigrant moss, water, ate air. Verdigree to hide copper. Abiding in the tides, march of middle passages, tsunamis of history, whose rust still stains ink the color of blood. Draw. Verdigree to hide copper, one hand a relic, another a river. Ink the color of dried blood, draw blood that runs like water, cries for mother, a clot, a stop to the shot in the back, in the dark, in the bed. One hand a relic, another a river. Lakes here and twin seas see. A stop to the shot in the back, in the dark, in the bed. The madness of no return belongs to the desert. I've pinned my hopes on the young. I've pinned my hopes on the old and young flood. Lakes here and twin seas see. A crack, thin as razor wire, ran from the lip. I've pinned my hopes on the old and young flood. The whole damned thing. Come, swell current, swift straws of hands to skies. Bring on the rain. Thank you. One more round of applause for Monica Muri and Sophia Nass. And the authors have examples of their publications on the table. Feel free to come up and examine them. Purchase them if you like. We also have some more cookies. I think we're running out of coffee, alas. Thanks for coming and pick up a flyer also for our coming events.