 All right. Welcome. Thank you all for being here tonight. And my name is Anisa. I'm your librarian host here tonight. And we want to thank you for joining us for our special guests tonight. We're going to be talking about a lot of events happening throughout May and all year round celebrating AAPI. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Aloni Tribal people and acknowledge the many Romitush Aloni Tribal groups and families in the community. And acknowledge the many Romitush Aloni Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we live and work in the Bay Area. The library is committed to uplifting the names of these communities and members from these nations with whom we live. We also encourage you to learn more about first person culture and land rights and are committed to hosting events and providing educational resources and book lists on this topic. We love making book lists. So in the chat, I'll put a link to tonight's event, which will have library resources, as well as links to Muriel and our friends that are reading as well. And to the Kearney Street. And anything that comes up, I'll also put that in the chat box and link it back to the library if possible, and to other places. We want to condemn the horrendous violence against Asian and Asian Americans in our communities. The library is for sure not a neutral institution. We stand in solidarity with our Asian community members and Black Lives Matter and understand that anti-Black and anti-Asian racism both uphold white supremacy, and then all of our communities are harmed by these racial structures. The library works hard on our racial equity commitment and that is in this document, the link to our racial equity work we've been working on. And I'll also put it in the chat, but if you just Googled SFPL racial equity, you would find all the work, not just that the library is doing, but our city is doing. All right. The library opened on Monday. So it was very amazing. There was, if you haven't seen on the Twitter, the opening, our staff did an applause for all of the folks who came in and there were some tears. It was amazing. So I would say by mid-summer a few more branches will open. We right now have 16 locations open for to-go service as well as our bookmobiles are out there. And just a reminder to keep your masks on when coming to our library and coming to our live to go and anywhere you're out there, protect all of our family and friends serving in the streets. All right. On Friday we have Mr. Martinian. He's so fun. And he's just such an icon. And I'm like, we've had him three times now. I'm surprised every time that he nails his cooking program in less than an hour. He's just, he's on top of it and super fun. So check that out. Saturday we have two events, graphic novelist and author of Tressay, which is now a Netflix option. And then a panel of artists who are working for social and political change. And now I'm going to breeze through some of these events we have and I will put the link in the chat box of events coming up. We are celebrating a Leavals book home baked, which is part of our first total SF book club May 20 in person. Not in person, in person, the cure. And on the same page, which is a monthly, bimonthly read that we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book. For May we're celebrating author and journalist Vanessa Hoa and her book Reverse Stars, which is a really wonderful book of tragedy and humor and lots of San Francisco. If you do not follow Chinatown pretty on Instagram, I suggest you do such amazing and beautiful seniors and so stylish and the best socks in the town. It's Chronicles six different Chinatowns. And it's now a chronicle book. All right, and now I would like to introduce Jason from Kearney Street Workshop and Jason we thank you for being here and we thank you for partnering with the library. Thank you. Thank you to the San Francisco Public Library. We're so happy to partner with you on this. It's going to be an amazing reading. Yeah, so. Yeah, I'm Jason Bonnie I'm the artistic director for Kearney Street Workshop. We are a 49 turning 50 year old arts organization. Asian Pacific American Arts Organization one of the oldest in this country. And yeah, we we offer programs events, workshops, classes throughout the year. We got a lot of amazing stuff coming up check out our website, Kearney street.org, or follow us on social media at Kearney Street at Kearney Street workshop on Instagram. And check out what we're doing, including, you know, we got a lot of great stuff coming up including our annual festival aperture, which puts the focus on emerging Asian Pacific American artists here in the Bay Area. So, yeah, if you have questions you can always contact us and hope to see you around. And we are so excited for this reading. I think one of these readers we adore, and think they're awesome. And we can't wait to see what they bring to the to the stage tonight so without further ado I'd like to introduce Muriel. Let's give it up for Muriel and everyone. Thank you Jason for that intro. I told him to add live so I think I did a great. Welcome everyone to imagine us to swarm a launch party for those of you who don't know me. My name is Muriel Lee young and I'm the author of imagine us to swarm winner of the 2029 but poetry prize a book which officially releases on May 25, but which is available for preorder. Right now, before we begin, I just want to thank Jason Viani at Carnegie Street Workshop, one of the sponsors for this event for always holding it down for Asian and Pacific Islander American artists performers and writers. KSW has been my literary home even before I moved to the Bay. So I'm just really thankful to be part of such a supportive community. I also want to thank Anissa and the staff of the San Francisco Public Library for partnering with KSW for this event. One of the first residencies I've done is in the Bay is with radar production shows your Spines Fellowship, which allows us to pursue research in LGBTQ topics within San Francisco Public Library's rich archives. So it's really wonderful to come full circle here. Since this reading requires everyone who's not reading today to mute their videos, I invite everyone in the audience today to send their love, cheers, good vibes through the chat box, which I see so you've already been doing. Hi, hello. If you hear something from tonight that makes you go yes or moves you feel free to note that in the chat. And I actually want to try that out right now with a little activity. So I promised trivia raffle giveaways and I can only promise you one of three today because I'm tired. So Jen and I were going to do giveaways and there's gonna be two of them. And the first one is going to happen now. So the first giveaway is this and it does require you to participate in the chat. I'm going to offer a short writing prompt. You, the audience member, if you're willing, is going to respond to that prompt in the chat. The readers with me tonight will help me select the best response to the prompt I'm offering. And that person will be the winning recipient of a signed copy of my book. So sounds like people love prompts and interactive activities. So that's great. Okay, are you ready for the prompt? I'm going to read it out loud twice and I'll also put it in the chat. Here we go. Here's a prompt. Complete the following statement about complete the following statement with as much possibility as you can muster. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm. Here's a prompt. Complete the following statement with as much possibility as you can muster. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm. So take your time with this prompt. I want to say a few words about this book, which is going to take about one to two minutes. And then after I'm done, I'm going to check on all of you and we will select our first winner. So my uncle, Chaldean Tran, who is one of the poets celebrating this book with me here today, once said, write the book as if you're writing a life. He meant it as a way of thinking of the poem as something much bigger than the single lyric on the page, the one that constantly reinvents what it means to make an art object, one that stands the test of time. Imagine us a swarm did not have such great ambitions when it began. Really, I wanted to write about how even after the publication of bone confetti, my first book, the weight of one's personal history could not be just simply excised. I wanted to write about my father, how he tried the failure already embedded and model minorities myth making, and what it means to write now, which is a type of labor, so punishing at times the proximity of our mutual struggles. But of course, the forces underlying this are far bigger demands more space. And so one short essay became seven constellated texts, an autobiographical collection of essays and verse that leans so heavily into a morning song that what it means to be Asian American, raised and gendered the way I am demand to be rewritten. Perhaps one of the many reasons why I'm so excited to celebrate this work today is because I know there is a new era of Asian American writing emerging, one that extends from the traditional practices of cross racial solidarity, which also acknowledges that much has to be done to unpack the anti blackness that still courses through our histories. It is an era where problematizing of Asian American as a unifying term does not issue a significant historical history, but allows us to imagine how we can do this work better, more radically in the spirit of abolition. I see this in the art that is out there now, and the writers I've invited to take part in the celebration today exemplify for me some of those important figures in this movement. Addie Sy, Hari Elori, NGC Chen Liao, Janice Lobo, Safi Gao, Chuang Tran. Thank you to them and to so many writers who are pushing this conversation forward. So, before we begin, let's pick our first winner for this giveaway. Addie, Hari, Angie, Janice, Chuang, which of our audience responses most resonate with you. Start with, and you can unmute yourselves if you want to chime in with some thoughts. There's a lot of responses. So many of them are so good. I just, well, who dropped in the most recent one. And I've been, I've just been moved by. I'm just, I want to say Rachel because she got it in first. I've been moved by all of them. We've got rhizomes from Dan. We've got possibilities. Upside doubting the other way. The togetherness, the strength of skin that can't be stung. So I'm like, I'm like, I'm going back to like whoever threw that one first. I'm going to say Rachel. These are all amazing. I want to take my time reading through some of these. I want to read them aloud and make an impromptu poem right now. Oh my God. Should we? Okay, can can you all help me read them out loud? I think it'll be too chaotic if everyone is unmuted, but maybe just the readers. If you want to unmute yourselves and read them out loud. Popcorn style. I'm down to read. I'll read the first one and I'll, and I'll, and we'll maybe we'll just go around our little readers. When I imagine all the possibilities of the storm, my body becomes honey becomes gold becomes abundance. I'll read something. I stagger soberly towards it. All of them or us as swarm slicing towards forward slicing forward in time with purpose shared and unspoken Evan Chan. You'll have to excuse me if I live a little bit because I didn't understand the swarm at first, but I'll give it a try. I think I put when I imagine the possibilities of the swarm I think of my open mind for API folks plus police brutality victims like Queen Breonna Taylor and from the Bay Area probably Mario Woods and Oscar Grant. Mario got killed in this in in services. Thank you. Okay, can I read to that I really liked. From when I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm the swarm possibilities meet back into my own imagination. And one more from Jordan. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I'm usually in the back of a pickup truck unbelted under both stars and a possible storm my neighbor driving down the age to eating the breeze made line like where you can almost hear the broken treaties in it. Okay. All right Dan, when I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm my rise I'm exhales into an embrace. I'll read Keana's when I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I am released into laughter. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I start to expand bigger and bigger until I am so large that I can't see over my own horizon, and I am no longer myself but something bigger, much, much bigger. A couple more Keana, when I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I am released into laughter. Victoria, I imagine the sky cracking into shards of glory. If I can read Fenwell's when I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm and soon into its callings my tongue elixible of the future. I'll read Johnny's. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm one purpose shared by many collecting sweetness for each other. And jubies. I write it, let it crest. I wonder what it means to be consumed by what's coming. What I wouldn't give for a moment in this movement. Here's Elizabeth. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I imagine the unending creativity, beauty, insight and strength of the voice behind it. Katie, when I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I swarm all the possibilities of my imagining. And finally I know myself. There is a revision that I would like to read. I stagger, I stagger soberly towards it. All of them or us as swarm slicing forward in time with purpose shared and unspoken. Did we miss any or I think there's a couple right and haven't read out loud. I'd love to read Christians. When I imagine the possibilities of the swarm I rearrange my bones and all our past selves are healed and are forgiven into future selves. I'll read Jules. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I know that colony entropy is an unconscious ballet of love shared values and infinite futures. Anthony's. When I imagine all the possibility of the swarm I stay standing stand in like to block all the energies against me and the ones I call family. When I imagine all the possibilities of the swarm I imagine that the end of us isn't the same as the end altogether. Nancy, when I imagine the possibilities of the swarm, I think he meant swarm or form, the sky expands to hold my heart. When I imagine the form the sky expands on my heart. I like that too. Did we miss anyone? I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to miss anyone, but there's a lot of great responses. Okay, but we have to pick one out of all of them. So we got one, we got Rachel because they are first. Also, you all must really like free books. So I did not expect this many responses. Okay, any other, any other bids from the rest of the readers? I wonder if choosing at random would be easier than choosing on purpose. Probably. Okay. All right, for, for this one we'll just say, Rachel, because you are the first to share, and that's really hard to do, as we know with writing prompts. Thank you so much for participating. Thumbs up for Rochelle because I had to put the API. Sorry, I couldn't, I didn't catch that. I said thumbs up for Rachel, because I said thumbs up for Rochelle as the winner. Thank you. All right. So Rachel, I'm going to send you some message. So if you could just email me, I will go ahead and send you an email your address. I will send you a copy of the signed book. So thank you so much for participating. Thank you all for sharing your beautiful, beautiful responses. I can't wait to look through the chat later and read them through them more carefully. So thank you so much. Okay, so this is the first good way. There's going to be another one coming up soon. I'm sorry if I didn't get to read yours out loud. But now that I really appreciate all the time you've all taken to respond. So without further ado, I'm excited to introduce our first reader for today. My dear friend Addie Sy, pronouns she, they is a queer non binary artist and writer of color and teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance and humanities at Houston Community College. She teaches and got our colleges MFA in interdisciplinary arts and reaches universities mile high MFA in creative writing. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh dance theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel among others. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in dance from Texas Women's University. She's the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin which made the 2021 rainbow book list and received press in auto straddle, bustle, lambda literary review and others. This writing has been published in Foglifter, Vita Lit, The Texas Review and elsewhere. They are the fiction co editor at anomaly staff writer at Spectrum self and founding editor and editor in chief of just femme and dandy. Please welcome Addie. I'm really so excited to be here to celebrate Muriel's new book, which I just read it's gorgeous and you're in for a treat. I'm just going to read just a few poems. Thank you. Baba's house a pair of rain boots the color of lemons is desire. And desire was freedom. When Baba said no I hit underneath the bed. Another sign that I was free. That image was an anomaly. Or an experiment you might say where my skin is a magnolia defiant and the anomaly, Baba's confusion. I don't understand not even raining outside was a lie. Would you like a mooncake. Sometimes I read a novel about a girl whose face is ravaged. Mine must be the opposite, maybe you can still see the shadow where the baby fat was cleaved off with a Chinese butcher knife. Sometimes I think my face belies me. My eyes, they still know how to fix on a subject, wander around in an attempt to look nonchalant. I think I belied my face to spongy and infant told me once grabbing the mess of it in both hands and kissing me on the mouth. I wonder if I throw my brow long enough. Well that crease in the middle of my otherwise perfect skin, give me just the edge I need. But let's not talk about vanity. Not now as I flash back to the hours I spent in my father's car staring at my eyes in the rear view mirror. Never now how I got in the way of his defensive driving, merely me trying to take him out of the equation. What equation. Let's talk about something else. My voice maybe how it takes on the language of the ancient, the only the only English I've ever known, say something to me in another language. I promise you I'll nod my head for a moment, laugh a bell laugh that almost sounds like embarrassment, but could be prior knowledge. Am I making sense yet didn't think so. Go ahead, grab my fleshy face the way you'd like to grab the moon. That is, if the moon were in front of you on the table, puffy and round like dough. I want to. Elegy for the unborn on the rape of Nanjing China 1937 on the birth of my father Nanjing China 1948 and sleep my brown hair is long. It braids into ropes slick and blackened like tar. It's splinter. They finger the impression of rings, the filaments round my feathered ankles in the air semen and pine from chairs scorched like forest burning. My mouth, a desert wind across the face, bodyless braids bristling heads buried beneath tombstones of men. When I sleep, my grandmother's streak hangs a mute oracle. When I sleep, the trenches of war are smoothed over like sand with sand, my hand scouring her body for my father's stretch marks, like a nail. Thank you. Thank you so much, Eddie. That's really great. The next person to read. Hi, Lori's pronouns. He him see ya as the author of the late city from kayak press, a winner of the 2020 Leonard a slave junior fellowship for poets of color and the recipient of grants from the Canada Council of the Arts. His work appears recently or soon in the watcher head and pandemic solidarity anthologies, as well as Apigee solstice tinderbox witness and elsewhere. The lawyers collaborations lately are through BIPOC writing community, community building artworks, the cult, the digital Salah, massive books and soft cedar. Please welcome Hari. Thank you so much Mario. Thank you. Just everyone who's here I'm like looking at faces, trying not to get stuck on how many beautiful folks are in the house. I just saw a cousin, who's beautiful face after give a shout out to. And all the other readers I'm excited thank you for that, like, while beginning and big up to the, to the folks who threw down and made a group poem before we even had to read making it easier for all of us. So Mario's work challenges me to open to juxtapose to be transformed in the telling to allow the telling to be more than what it is and also to be aware of the ways that it's less than the stories that we're trying to tell that the holes and also portals. I looked up the numerology for today, and one version of it is the number 42, which on the sacred symbols deck is release. And the symbol of that is the coupon. And I kind of just, I think, like this is this is from Muriel Muriel I think you'll see the ways in which this is a palm back to imagine this this for Oracle card release for an after Muriel. The most recent dish that I burnt was an attempt to add ox tail today old synagogue. One of the bones took the shape of a bird star at its center. I freaked out like I deserved a deep, deep type of punishment. And it's haunted me ever since. In another haunting. There was a week one summer years ago notice Muriel I didn't say once, but I will say again. There was a mentor at a youth camp by a lake in the interior of a province I've barely been to since, when every lesson that came to me was accompanied by beasting. I was getting stung between two and seven times a day. This is not a metaphor. I'm the type of person creatures have to die for just so I would prick up my ears and cringe for years after at words like forgiveness. I've spent the forgiveness mudra several times, not yet. To my oldest friend who's still alive. I text this to you from a world that you can't reach. I wish for you that the bottles miss your head that any knives you face no longer cut you. I am sorry that I have been one of those knives. I'm sorry for any knife blade stories I gave another to harm you with this time I'll walk the longer block from work toward where you live. So the next time we share a cigarette's time. It's closer to where our 1990s teenage brown boy poses litter your floor. The casual understanding our masculinity couldn't handle lifting fog the camera prefers to anything steady. Maybe that is also a form of sweeping because the photo album empty as a body for what is safe to keep. As you already know I'm going to tell you that bees are hold a sacrifice that we might know the scent of faith and spring. I guess you already know I struggled to be better. Bees died by plunging their stingers into me and I still haven't learned my lessons were ugly when we stretch toward our most beautiful cells were ugly because of how difficult that stretch were ugly enough that futile as it might be the words of creatures might offer their only sting sacrificed their most holiest lives as if to tell us how dangerous forgiveness is. Of course, I know that wasn't why they stuck me more likely I kept on receiving my lessons too close to where they wished they were safe. Still, they died and it was a kind of punctuation. It seemed to me that the fuck you mudra the fuck you symbol is a mudra to the moot to inhabit is to absorb centipedes of flame the roots of the islands that were from should I believe what I just said. This is only a little tongue of dirt, a little divination, the city you leave in me as elder trees whose carvings weren't carved by hands, beat down alleys to and a glinting I'm still afraid to tell you isn't the moment when my fate is the body of a bee curled up after its sting. Sweet as in skin as in punctuated as an absorption as in the body rock. My teeth are only perfect where the braces failed to take. If a thing can pull you, it can hurt you. And that's the prize to inhabit as this thing. I would start at the center be an anchor. If the center isn't where the center thinks it is. My spine becomes another flag, Muriel, the young. The meat poor sauce is rich again with lingering. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you, Hari. Thank you for this gift. So this is exactly what I love is being able to have a work that is in conversation with the people that have really inspired me and whose work I hold dear. So I am going to be remembering all these words shared yours and Addie's like for a long time. So thank you so much. I'm excited to introduce the next reader and JC Jen Lowe with the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her work has appeared in the American poetry review poetry Northwest fence black warrior review, the adroit journal, the Asian American literary review hyphen the margins and others. She is a condiment fellow, a PhD candidate and literature and creative writing at the University of California Santa Cruz, and the calculus instructor as then Quentin State prison. She received fellowships and support from the Vermont studio center Malay colony and the Mendocino coast writers conference. She lives in Oakland. Hi Angie. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for hosting and chameleon for inviting me to read. I'm so honored to be included in this evening of joy and celebration in this virtual ether. So I want to start by saying a few words about the book. I started with Mario's work was years ago actually before we became friends. And when she published this is to live several lives in the journal nap rut. It's a piece I've held close to me over the years, and I was so happy to see a new version of it as the membrane of this book. I love this piece to my creative writing students on the week of lyric essays, not only because the piece is beautifully written in heartbreaking but also because it seems to construct its own ontological grammar. It illustrates the lyric I as a self and fragments and the speaker never seeks to consolidate these fragments, but instead consolidate them. This piece speaks to the instrument of poetry for me as that which constellates a totality. And speaking of constellating. I also want to note that this book is a Gemini and air sign, and I look forward to the day when I can buy a merry old drink and gosh about all this in real life. Okay. I'm just going to read a couple poems called the Berkeley Rose Garden. At last the bleeding days past and how the horses ride without Latria muscles they glint sport beside the Slavart Highway, each alien tooth soiled with actual stars. These days of isolation, rumor and I paste the meridian of his dune quiet street, naming boundaries for time, agrarian dark, almost light. The sky is not desk, but the errant pulse of the thing that drives us, madly into a forever fit of shadow. Through windows the eeriness of people living newly inside homes, faces shaven and unlit, sitting and chairs not saddened before, speaking in tongues unspoken of before. There's lovely lucris darkly cinema and flash ambient or whatever hopes for themselves lapsed before the silicone moon. It was a mirage saturated with its own coming, our dead cypher in dead assets liquefying as rain at the limits of our accumulation how we could be dispersed. I believe I'm done with Babylon until Parker and I bike through East London's Serpentine Dark. The coldest light defends us. What pure topology can history unmake? The river thames begs for ablution, some pools too oblique for the burial, and the hills, this lucid like nothing else. The riverweeds trace our elemental body, while the ones we love, the faultless ones, spin records in the warehouse where we sleep. I ring my bell in darkness. Hello, I've come to fight you only in wars that I've ended. Hackney Wick, boiler room in my dreams, room I forget how to language, this it rains. I can't believe what I was. I can't believe what I am. Our bodies made coalitional again. I talisman my longing, it stays evening all day. I talisman so much that larval river in the muted swan, brightness shaking in the black. It is a phase of being alive, I need a cruelty to slip into. I need lilies to shiver and animus before the sun. I light the stove to cook eggs in specific ways. For you, I keep my brainless heart, the yoke that is not yoke, but the nucleus I translate from one tongue to the tongue that seized us, each of us birthing the other their center. If I were the Euphrates, I would darken my braid. If I were the Genesis, I could let poetry ruin my cyber at face. We are always in metaphor, are knifing out an exit, we've sent the scythe that gives violence to the sign, how it slits, it slits me liminal. Will the angel of history show a glimpse of his cards. We drink sun warm sprite in the high gate cemetery, my ointment pure, my loving's conditional. All we've lost we sublate into total loss. I only know earth as a concept I ruminate until the real you comes I could bleed clean into. Thank you. Thank you. Our next reader is Janice Lobo Sapikao. She is a poet from San Jose, California. She's the author of two books of poetry, microchips for millions from Philippine American writers and artists, Inc. in 2016. And like a solid to a shadow from night book 2017. She is the 2020 2021 Santa Clara County poet. Janice. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Muriel. I want to say congratulations on your second book and forgive my bee puns, but I am excited for it to release into the world and to surround everyone. Thank you. Thank you for the first part and it left me wanting to take my time before I continue to read the rest. So I don't know if there are spoilers in poetry collections, but for everyone, I guess I want to say that the part about the golden prom dress let led me to think about what I would read today, because I saw that moment from like so many different It just, I, okay. Can I just read this like strong line from your collection, Muriel, I don't, I don't want to like ruin anything that you're about to read. These lines, let me tell you a story which begins with a death and ends with the study of a life of labor. Let me, let me to think about how every breath is laborious. And then I just started thinking more and more about the layers of mourning and grieving and so that's how I put my poems together and if anyone wants to follow along. You can, I put a link in the chat. This first poem is called caretaking. I help my mother into the shower and she holds me the way I held on to handle bars or seatbelts during roller coaster rides at the local theme park where I had my first job. Ma dropped me off every day for almost every shift the same way I took her to most doctors appointments, both places in Santa Clara, both places temporary. And I give my mom a calendar, not knowing how many days she'll have left with us. I give my mom clothes and she says she can't take them with her where she's going and where she going without me. She tells my brother in a muted voice undetected by the baby monitor we put in her room. She says she is going to see her parents soon. And the last time we saw them was at their funerals. I can't help by letting her help herself to her towel, sitting on her walker by wiping and drying her legs and feet, and places she can't reach. I observe that bending over a stomach cyst is not painful, but heartbreaking, not impossible, but terrifying. I want to help. I know caretaking is one constant waiting room, a routine of return of make believe. I become the nurse she wanted me to be while I studied writing. I will be anything. Does she know I don't blink. I wash the world away, the one without her caretaking. I don't know. Thanks. Thanks for listening. These are drafts. I don't know. I'm just really happy to be in this space and to be here. I think I wrote about this on Instagram the other day, but Meryl once helped calm me down when I was freaking out before reading, and Meryl just looked at me in a very calm way and said, I'm glad I'm not the only one who freaks out before reading, which I think you all can hear Meryl saying in your head. So thank you for that. Here is the last half of what I'll be reading and freaking out about. This poem is called A Story of Flowers, and I wrote it during the digital solo, like when you're just sharing writings with each other. So I started buying myself flowers every other week, maybe just to see how long they'd last. The flowers or the habit or both. And it's been nine months now since she passed. And not even me or department stores or roses or peonies or carnations gathered nothing she enjoyed most will bring her back. I think about it often, losing my mom and buying flowers, the latter teaching me about the former, and what it means to take care of a dying but living thing, how delicate a body, a belonging is. And maybe this is what it means to leave anything in offering. And maybe this is what it means to leave a tender, a softening. Maybe people are right when they'd say they'd give anything to get something back. But what if you have nothing after copays and appointments and emails where you have to remind doctors about their hearts and yours, and that the world is not clinical. Every unanswered question that comes from insurance from aunties asking why and how from cousins who stack advice when I call. I have trouble saying the word die. So instead, I will say, I watched purple daisies darken and droop. I watched their next pillow, the rim of a vase. I saw their pedals grip and release like tiny fingers. The flowers filaments fell forward. I will say that she hugged herself asleep. I'll say that she brought the new day without her in it. Thank you everyone for listening and to Muriel for inviting me to read. And I just want to say that without bees, we wouldn't have any flowers. Thank you. Thank you so much, Janice. I had, you know, I started to write like personal notes to introduce everyone at this reading and I realized that they were becoming essays. So I took that out and so I would email you all privately later. But I will say that Janice, Janice's microchips from millions of ones, one of those books that deeply influenced Imaginus's form. And I, and I love when Janice reads because there's, I think there's a conjuring of so many ancestral voices into this space. So I just wanted to, to recognize that. Thank you, Janice. The next reader is someone who, like a mentor to me, my uncle Chung Tran is a poet and visual artist. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at California Institute of Integral Studies, the Telegraph Hill Gallery, Soma Arts, Nina Dresden Gallery, and the Peninsula Museum of Art. His books included Placing the Accents, The Book of Perceptions, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margin, Four Letter Words, 100 Words, and the much anticipated Book of the Other, forthcoming October 2021 from Kaya Press. Please definitely check that out. He is currently the Adjunct Professor of Poetry at Mills College where he teaches graduate courses about poetics and the crossing of writing and visual arts. Please welcome Chung. Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Mariel, congratulations on this book. There is no greater honor than to be called your uncle. I really appreciate that because I don't have that great a relationship with my nephews. So I, it's a great honor to be called that. And I also want to say that I remember when you were writing this book, I think we were sharing a space together. We were sharing a studio and I remember you reading some of these poems to me. I don't, I don't know if you recall, but you read some of these poems, at least a couple of them. This is going to be a book and not just a book. This is also a time new book. So congratulations. I'm going to read a writing prompt, a footnote, home with a footnote. So I'll try to keep it quick. The writing prompt is, I was asked to include a writing prompt in this book that I'm releasing in October. And after 20 years of teaching, I think I've earned the right to write this writing prompt. The five obstructions, a poetry exorcism. One, state of fact, begin your statement with this motherfucker. Two, confront a lie, use profanity, something like, hey motherfucker. Three, ask a question. Ask this of a motherfucker. Four, identify an audience then exclude in your exclusion include the word motherfucker. Five, still, there's something you did not say. Say it in the footnote. Use motherfucker. This is a poem that addresses my use of the word. In the course of this book, the word is used deliberately in excess. The word is used and something, someone laughed. The word is used in a sentence out of anger. The word is used as metaphoric violence. The word is used in context of the mother. My mother, if she knew if translated, I think my mother would approve of the word. The word interrupts in the course of this book. The word I'm told is just the word. She calls every day at 8am. My mother insists on interrupting my slumber. My mother says she is my alarm clock. A Vietnamese man died this week stabbed in the heart. The word is used because there is no other word written again into this book. My mother calls to know that I'm alive. The man who died. I wonder if his mother is still alive. Another Vietnamese man is killed in the in the same week. My mother calls to tell me of this news. She won't stop watching. 8 in the morning and my mother calls with gruesome details of how a Vietnamese man is killed and dismembered. The word is interrupting even now. My mother tells me the man they killed is about my age, if not a bit older. My mother tells me the boys who killed him are white and the age of my students. In the course of this book, I am thinking about the word and its use. I temper the word by changing a letter. The word I know is not just the word. I think about my mother all the time and the mothers of those who have been hurt and killed and the mothers of those who hurt and kill the word. My mother, the mother of the word. Footnote. I question the word. I question this poem. I question if I even have the right to use this word to write this poem. Someone will question the language of this poem of this book that is to be expected. But if this is not clear, if I'm not clear, this is anger. I wake up angry because my mother calls at 8am. I wake up angry. Someone is dying all the time. And this is a poem that is actually a footnote. What is enough? How will I live? What is enough? How will I live? This declaration, these are the only two questions I want to answer. Ask of myself. Last night I went to bed and slept continuously for a duration of eight hours. I can't remember the last time I've been able to sleep seamlessly through a night. I woke up this morning feeling rested and dare I say it hopeful. As the day progressed, this hope, it comes. As I move my body through the world slowly, this hope, it goes. The news of a mass shooting after a year of absence. This is normalizing. This is waking. These questions they keep on coming back. What is enough? How will I live? I water the plants in my garden. In other news, an elderly Asian woman fights back. She sends her assailant to the hospital. He hit me for no reason. These are not her exact. I'm sorry. These are not her exact. I'm getting old folks. I can't even. These are not her words exact. They are the English captions of a life translated. This woman, I see my mother from a distance. What is enough? I potted a tree. I bought a bag of vegetables. How will I live? I'm writing these words. I'm breathing through a mask. What is enough? My former students have been sending notes. How are you doing? Please be careful. Sending you hugs. Fuck them, Trun. I'm thinking about buying some pepper spray for you. And so I carry a stick for protection. I'm walking, even if it's only to the thrift store and back. I'm still pretty tough and still I'm afraid of walking down the street. What is enough? It comes. It goes. How will I live? This hope. I'm walking every day. Thank you. Thank you so much Trun. You know, I know we talk about the timeliness of our work. I feel like so many writers I know today have been long speaking out about racialized violence. And so the things that are certainly not new are still horrific. And I do appreciate that there is that message of walking with hope every day and the dailiness of it and persistence that you're ending with. So thank you so much to Adi, Hari, Angie, Janice and Trun for sharing this space with me today. Before I close out the night with a reading from my book, I want to share one last giveaway with you all. So tonight I'm going to be reading from the last section of my book, which is entitled When I Imagine All the Possibilities of the Swarm. The section of the book features pieces that all begin with the refrain supposed, each a speculative rendering of what it means to rewrite past wrongs, correct parts of history we sometimes wish we could forget, not as a will for forgetting, but as an experiment to imagine a different kind of future and tether to the cumulative entries of our pasts and the generations that precede us. What would it look like if we were unburdened from this, even if for a while in the dream of a future? I think there is immense power in this visioning, and I hope that there's one thing that I can all take with you today, it is that. So for this final giveaway, I offer you one last prompt, which you'll have until the end of this reading to complete. I'll put it in the chat as well. The prompt is this. Conjure the highest hope for a future in which you are free. Begin your statement with supposed and see where it takes you. So the prompt is this. Conjure the highest hope for a future in which you are free. Begin your statement with supposed and see where it takes you. See if I can share my screen. Can you all see this? Okay. Yes. Thank you. Suppose everybody I ever loved made up a tiny universe in which each one thrived in their own planetary hues. I mistook each one for the central star common mistake. And still I draped each of them in the garments of changing seasons. How many moons I asked. They answered and I supplied. The universe moved in stride and form. Each planet missing the other in orbit. I did not intend to collapse the blue planet still unfurling in its newness, but the layers of its life saw no future for water. I abandoned a dry well. I floundered. Years ago, the universe held a pale sun. It struck a match to every star kiss body. And in its stillness was painful as glass. I thought falling in love went meant white hot. But that was only a fraction of the universe of time. I felt the shadow first when I pleaded eclipsed me. It was a chaos of spurs and it burns. It came and went and then returning begged a spun miracle of ring. There would be no end to this carrying. For them, I knew I would always wait. Turning my body over. I saw the universe was haved. It's noisy assemblage, sliding towards collision. I held the planet's clothes. I pressed their gaseous swarms to ruckus mass. I did this so they would believe me. Having endured the labor of the current, the universe was fast expanding. It needed to fold. Even I could not bear it. I surrendered and I loved them all. Suppose the impact was a bell. A warning instead moving through a hollow factory. The violence of men and the colonial rituals of their past were a lesson. And the pedagogy of grief, the earth was good. And then history, the stalwart chemicals of his wake still seeps into soil. Will we not reverse that too if we could? The atomic weight of him pressed so deep into my torso that generations after would feel the soreness of ribs. Suppose my grandfather never struck my aunts because her cheek was there and my father and his piety to the self-same heaving did not instead tell her to move out of the way. Because I was born witnessing and in my queerness still desire the love of these masculine injuries, I listened too closely and was lost. The pattern undulates and recedes. Suppose I became the sound of wind chimes crashing into the ground startling the other body there that would not move. The ghost of my future visits my past and tells her you have to be brave. I could fortify my life this way. I lead into the bone. Refusal of instruction will bully me when memory is not enough. To feel even now the soft impressions of many thumbs, they are not the violence I remember. There is nothing left to forgive. Suppose it is easy to believe. Every sparrow landing leaves a fossilized mark, the hard air pushing against its wings having shape, texture and fold. Easy to swallow what we cannot see. What the barriers of flesh cannot know. The coarseness of evidence. The fabric of my hide. There would be no question of feathers. The lightness accruing iron. No animal testifying to the grave. When I bleed, I bleed. The forest rushes to bind the body red to me. Easy to make amends out of water. The fish leap from the foam and this can be a victory too. Though I once placed too much faith in brute and ardor, it is softness that touches me. Even in the absence of love, I kneel before the altar of its loss. My belief lit by candle alone. I have this belief in the afterlife of many tender objects, the persistence of their kin. Belief that though the truth pockets hold, I do blind and the kite of it is waiting there. Which I colored bells. There is proof enough for you and me. There would never be any need for proof again. When I say I believe you, I mean this, the kites, the colors, the clarity of bells. And this is the last one. Suppose there is an end to our suffering. Like a chariot, in the absence of grief circles us with the obstinate heat of the largest star. To believe in the radiant orbit of this fire. To face an empty cup and find a consolated mire of you and me in the toppling of a century. We rise from the painful corridors of a life. Rarely did we dream of planetary rings and yet tilting ourselves up, in the midst of all that has passed, each one bright with surrender, we can go on, we can dress ourselves in this celestial cloak of this wide expanse. Every woman and femme and the disorder of the appeal, I will never write another elegy again. I am looking at you now in the acceleration of time. All the possibilities of the swarm ignite. The humming of many wings amassing into a greater noise. We can write our origins sacred here and renounce the country of our fear. There is only our singular pulse when we fill the sky. So thank you so much for all who came here today and listened. I hope something that was shared tonight has resonated with you and that you will get a copy of Imagine Us a Swarm if you haven't yet. Or pick up a copy of any of the reader's books today whose work has really resonated with you. So for our final giveaway now, I think the whole picking out one of many terrific prompt responses was way too difficult, but I do like the idea of us, maybe each of us sharing all the readers sharing one out loud and then we'll just pick one at random. Or is this one of those prompts that no one did? I think I see one from Anthony. Suppose I have all the free time in the world, free to be me, unlimited, untethered, unopposed and unoppressed, no room for exploitation, only mutual respect and love. And that is true freedom. Thank you, Anthony. Here's Aika. Suppose every wound thorns no more. Suppose every more thorns no wound. Suppose I say yes and you say yes to. Suppose I say no and you say yes to. Suppose my supposition is superimposed by your super imposition. And from Tara, suppose we built our lives on the seas. From Claudia. Suppose we gather and move together without fear. Suppose one or a few or many take off. Scattering to our own discoveries. Suppose we gaze inward with grace. What we contain can no longer contain us. Very shallow game. Suppose I could be like the facade of this building, like the sidewalk, the air and plants, the comfort, the loneliness and touch. Thank you. I can read Jordan's. Suppose there's a future where I dream a future beyond now, and it no longer breaks me with distance, with difference. No one wakes up to the task of building a self that sells. The only patterns and fabrics covering us on porches, cooling, and everyone looks at each other with their whole lives. There is no year. There is no hard line. The whole world is an ocean and we can breathe here. We fall asleep dreaming of it. Mario, I'm going to be your uncle in this moment and say that. I fell off track and I can't see. I'm a lot of hate. I'll read on your behalf. This is from Lauren. Suppose I do after all leave my apartment and the days are broad, creased and full of hands. From Gustavo. Suppose not having to teach a child to protect themselves from institutions, institutions, institutions, institutions. Suppose all that pedagogy connector a kinder living instead. Ooh, there's a lot. I will need to spend some time with some of these. I'm sorry that I can't read every one of these out loud, but I hope you keep writing them. And I hope that some of these prompts have inspired some writing for you all to carry on with your days. I think if I were to choose someone at random, I'm going to go with Hari's method, which is whoever was the first one to respond, which was Anthony. So Anthony, thank you so much. This is my email. And you can go ahead and email me your address. And I was in use and copy of the book. Thank you so much to for participating in this writing prompts. Thank you. Thank you. All of you have shared, I know that some of you have shared some more detailed comments in the chat. And I just want to say I've seen that I've been reading it and I'm glad that it's resonated with you. And I hope that for reading that, I need to carry so much weight. I hope that there's a little bit of joy and hope that's come from this. And of course, thank you to everyone who read with us today. Thank you everyone for coming to celebrate. And Anthony, this reading will be recorded. And we'll be appearing on YouTube. So you can watch it again after this is done. So thank you so much everyone for coming. Enjoy the rest of your night. And hopefully I'll see you all in person some day. Everyone can unmute and like and, you know, give the official and thank you, Mario. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. And thank you. Thank you very much. And look for all of the books at SFPL. We got you covered.