 So I will read some from Collapse, I do have copies with me and then I'm going to attempt to read something brand new after. The whole world is standing rock, heart under hand, hand under heart. I don't know what they want from me. I was forced into those schools with their flags and red brick, principal's offices and special ed class. They wanted something I could not bleed. My heart beat red cloud and crazy horse. My heroes didn't wear shirts and shoes, not bound up in clothing. I was all hair in the wind, backseat free as bear horseback cantering through fields, standing in the back of pickup trucks, leaves from trees raining down on my face, my church in the green. I have no allegiance. Don't know what they want from me. I was eight when we drove south, got an Indian doll at the roadside stand in the backseat of the white station wagon, the white whale we inherited from grandpa. I learned the word reservation. A word like projects and penitentiary. I wondered what are they reserving? What is the project they work on? I could not understand. I would not. My stubborn hands on the doll's perfect black hair, brown skin, buck skin dress. My favorite t-shirt was orange, red cloud warrior, arms raised to the sky. And I never pledge allegiance to the country that takes away my heroes. So the whole, the manuscript was started in 2016. It was during the election. There's a lot of election ranting in it. Lots of gentrification ranting. So I'll read some of that. Bang bang, niner gang. If you grew up in San Francisco, you remember when Joe Montana ruled, probably rocked a red satin 49er starter jacket a time or two. When the winds filled the drunken streets with revelry, when ocean beach filled that rare, hot day. You probably remember, we always protested here, that the police were dicks, but they didn't kill us all of the time. This town was a 49er town working class and freak filled with hippies, punk rockers, black panthers, brown cholos, gay pride, and all of us living side by side. These days, you'll get called a gangbanger for wearing the color of your home team. In the park where you grew up, the white boy calls you out. His dog's chasing you and your food. The white boy moved here with the blizzard of folks who stand in line, laid into the night to eat burritos. Mr. Snow ain't from here, but it's so comfortable in his whiteness. He says red jacket makes you a gang member. Calls homeless, disgusting, calls you wet back. Your family has been here longer than he's been born. There are only white folks in the park now. Buildings burn to make way for the crop of them. They call the police on you. The firing squad without question. Empties clips, reloads, 59 shots, your 49er jacket, blood red, full of holes. You are one more name to be chanted in the streets we no longer recognize. I know the police have always worked for the rich. The war on drugs was always about locking brown people up and why these prisons are built, but I swear this town didn't used to be so mean. The newspaper doesn't mention that you went to school, had never been arrested. The newspaper said you were agitated, threatening. There are words that start with a T, thug and threat. There are trials. Police are never charged at trials. People keep on coming and coming, pointing you out, pushing us out to the edges like animals. To them we are bangers, we are beggars, we are tent city trash makers. We, the former tenants of San Francisco, dead in jail, sleeping under the freeway out here somewhere between Stockton and the grave. Mothing your flame. Saw you swiping faces to the left, to the left. There you were, looking smart in glasses. Your lips stopped me mid-swipe. I put you safely in my to-do box where you found me. You sent for me in the rain and I came to you nervous. The night was muggy when we hugged. Your lips turned up in a way I had never seen. I was pressing the weight of my body on you the whole time we talked and drank and drank. Said too many things too fast. Mad smiling magnets kissing in the middle of the bar, pushed together by strangers, twinkling Christmas lights and old school jams. We were lime squeeze. We were pomegranate juice and mint garnish swimming in tequila and rye. You said you loved me that first night and I believe you. Also for the same person. Terminology. Finally found the word for never finding the word, letharagica. Are you saying it's all in my head, all psychogenic, all jammed up like a shoplifting hoarder's attic? I'm always searching, checking for your next text. I was just about to do something but what but you, I remember and remember earworm eating my apple heart. You sticky, sticky hamster wheel. My teeth so tight together we should be together. I swipe left through tinder. There's no cuties after you. After you, there is only more you. I swipe right and then you left but you say you're not gone. I'm all amygdala lost my cortex. Oh, how I adore you tracing my muscles, naming them. Loosening trapezius under scapula. My nerves lighting up under your fingertips. The protuberance of my mammary gland in your mouth. Langua like ocean. The fleshy folds. The organs of speech. The pinkish or reddish margins. How I miss them like the edge of a wound. Jails have ATM machines now. Plastic cards by commissary and child support. For an extra $3 you can add a personal message. Don't worry about us. We'll be fine or we love and miss you. Happy birthday. After we slide our credit cards, a woman behind us struggles to shove in her few wrinkly dollar bills. On the block the kids stay out all night lining the stairs with hundreds of flaming prayer candles. Spray the walls for poody from two six. Implore him in death to shine on. Each night they bring the biggest red heart balloons the kind sold for valentines in high school graduation. They fill the street with beating heart cars double parked and spilling liquor in his memory. When the phone rings, you press five as fast as you can so as not to lose a precious moment of his voice. You accept that he can only speak to you on a police recording. There are options. More money for more minutes. You can buy them so we can't call anyone but you. You pay for time with no idea what words will fill it. How many ways can you say love or absent? You describe reaching for his side of the bed using his chapstick because it's the last thing to touch the softness of his lips. Lips you fell on and into in a bar. Lips you woke to like a life raft at sea behind security glass cracked and dry. They are an unkissed desert. You roll his chapstick on the thirst of your lips until you reach the empty plastic. You run your hands between your thighs where he buried his face at night. Feel nothing but exhaustion. Down the street, the kids are wrapping, dressed up, passing blunts, blowing smoke at the unfair sky. You place candles in your windows, burn sage. You mourn with them. You have suffered a kind of death also. In the morning, you pour two cups of coffee, empty his into the garden out back. The dogs are bored with your sadness, refuse belly rubs even when offered. You look the dog in her eye, share the disappointment of your own hand because indeed it is not his. You internet search the things you can and can't send him. These companies have made phone apps to send your money to jails. These enterprises who make the packages you send your beloved, the same who offered to send your college student modified food products. You tell them all the ways to recreate crackers, ramen and chips, to pretend it is sustenance when in fact it is currency. The first time you saw your son's college dorm, it struck you. These companies build prison cells. Prisoners build the beds and desks and both to house your child, your man, perhaps yourself one day. Outside at the memorial, they are barbecuing tonight. You put chicken in the oven, can't light charcoal without your grill man. You tell yourself you must live, you tell yourself to write, wait his call, wait and wait, lose weight. Memorize the number that has replaced his name, find his wet white dress shirt, bought for the courtroom, limp in the dryer, walk his letters to the mailbox, tell yourself you are living, a brain connected to a body, a hand to put money in the machine, a heart commodified, a special message. Don't worry about us, we'll be fine. Hurry one more. So I'm gonna read one more, it's a little bit long, but it's brand brand new, I've never read it before, so. And I'm gonna cuss, cause that's what I do. It's called all of the fucks. Number one, sleeping face on my pillow, a face I knew 30 years ago, innocent and serious like our prom picture. I crammed to understand this face, twisted and rage, blank when adoring, inside or out, there's a flatness. His fans show up with this face etched into their skin, swarm around to get a piece of him. I tried not to let him know the fucks I give, the mountain of fucks, tucked neatly into my chest. I used to scream, I don't give a fuck, I don't give a fuck, I don't give a single solitary fuck what you do to me. He stomped on me, but his absence hurt more. I knew his rage, I shared it, out of control and uncontrollable, even now neither of us could work a straight job, not cut out for being managed. I scratched his face and threatened him, even when punching, I crushed on the soft cotton of his clothing, the way he swaddles himself in layers of it, leaves wet mounds of undershort shirts and drawers beside my bed, still smells like soap and sugar. I fingered the soft insides of his exposed arm, his hands consumed mine, leave purple spots up and down me, giving a fuck is all I ever did, Mr. Boomerang. The second calls, a recording interrupts to remind us this call is from a correctional facility, counts down the seconds until it cuts us off, leaves him leaning concrete, sweating a dorm of 160 men in 110 degrees, no air, no freedom, no end in sight. He is the one I would marry. Then there's an international call, my Rosta, a pig farmer who fancies himself and love. He's lost his cell phone at sea and overloaded fishing boats sinking into the Aquamarine. He says my name over and over and calls me queen, asks me when I'll be ready for retiring, how many jobs he has to take to take care of me. The fourth is an ex who comes to lie on the floor next to my dying dog, weeping this illness, this loss, all of the death he has suffered the past year, or maybe he cries remembering when we first dated how we kicked this dog roughly off my bed, how I calmly told him that anyone who could hurt this dog, who does nothing but love, who lives to be close, just closeness, that's all he wants. Anyone who could hurt that must have a serious problem, I said with my back to him. After that he was never mean, he doted on both dogs even after I broke it off. He whispered love in velvet dog ears, words he was never brave enough or sure enough to say to me. Thank you. Thank you so much.