 So, I have some feel good poetry for you, not so much, and we're going to start with one called Opening Lines. You keep asking where I'm from. I've said New York City twice, twice, second generation. You keep examining like there's no equation, like somehow we began at the sum. Like later you won't try to impress with a Wu Tang lyric, Liberties with a Chappelle set. Like you don't know where we are, what we built. Like you don't know me. You keep asking where we're from, like the hyphen sits with no direction. Like we're still in between. You keep the game going with interrogation. You keep repeating the question, timed out of New York. Ordering off the off menu at Veselka, 2 a.m. Army of slosh, sauerkraut eating blint spestes, flashing out of town palladium kids, the real music of the city, through teeth smashing sweet and sour scenes, bartering for space, freestyle mixtapes on bleaker, buying from Pepito who knew Lisa Lisa before, the after-school run to 8th in Black Lycra for Newbock Button Doc Martens, chicken's feet on canal between the gray third rail and a magic yellow sports walkman, stomping base, mouth breathing through the smack of expired Chinatown, August, no better than sandals, antagonizing rats with red toes on snarled subway platforms, a warring chorus of stinging street poets, not soliciting vegetables, shroom haven, get a piece of heaven, hustling mark time on St. Mark's, gleaning from glistening drag queens at Mac on Christopher, gentle, patient, painted, nodding, dirty platinum men, the first to say, you're beautiful to the drum of the jungle brothers, underage and overstimulated, our ambition gnarled with the blondes, we blinked, the black and brown boys, Vogue got snatched, uptown, 3 a.m. train, beat stopped, you had to leave, the Cold War, more than AIDS, Arthur Ash said his true burden was being black. C.C. DeVille said being a junkie was sexier than being fat. Everything I know I learned from TV. So my narration is jerky, maybe sometimes unreliable. I know Madonna said power is being told you're not loved, undesirable and not being destroyed between commercial breaks. So Madonna was just in the last two poems, so the next series of poems I decided to read because of what happened in Alabama this week, and it's super in vogue to like respect black southern woman all of a sudden, and that's super sincere. So I've been doing that my whole life, and so I thought I'd just read this poem that I wrote about that. This is called Blood in the Soil. Tracing Crimson Veins, I found her name online, Lenison, my great great, glowing on pixelated brown, certification she was born before the war, we certainly didn't win. And though the website wouldn't name it, born belonging to Mrs. Sears. Names that don't matter, just that they took and gave her hers. Forced Red South Carolina, quick sand clay, under chattel nails, no lift in that lifetime. But she planted grit that quietly crept high enough above the trees to name her baby's babies to force their leaves. I mouth her name Lenison with every rise. I belong to her choreography, her suffocating wise, her leaping over lives like my grandmother's. I see her fastening from new man to new child to new man, fanning the flame to get a share, cropped her roots, her six foot frame. She flicks my wrist to leap into ash and sky, the bodyless hands would in third eyes, drop me in half stride, anointing, slicking a two headed freedom, bare knuckling wear and track, the familiar whip echoing snakes hiss, freefall, a prodding crack. We're so tired, the girls without proper provenance, women without a world that won't claim us or how our mother's only new birthright belonging is the main. Guideless steps become bloodthirst, we're game. Progress. I keep a picture of my grandmother on my fridge. In the photo, she's wearing a linen blazer that engulfs her shoulders as if it could have been a man's and not just a size too big, as if it were not made for her at all. Her white rimmed glasses have the same indifference for her body, pinching the bridge of her nose. Her hair is slicked and pinned in a bun that probably took the local hairdresser at least two hours to wash, press and curl. The way her white shirt clings to her clavicle, I can only imagine the picture was taken on a hot Harlem day. I keep the photo next to the 2009 inauguration photo, Michelle and felted golden lace. My grandmother's photograph has an amber Kodak filter. She probably paid more for at the local Woolworths down south or up north. I'm sure she thought it would make her look more sophisticated. Every time I close the fridge, I smell the steam that came out of that salon. Here the hair sizzling between each tooth of the hot comb, fighting tired, steady hands and humidity. Everything had to be in place for the next hour or so long enough to take the picture. The blueprint. I sit with Gwendolyn. We shut green peas over large rusty cylinders, over bent ashy knees. Deep in red clay, she smacks my hand. Stop fidgeting child focus. She says the names don't matter. The taste, the planes, the lessons are the same. Distraction spends time cost lives fill the bucket. Snap and stop for the sap of green. Snap and feel the round the rise of the forefinger. Snap without stopping. Snap. Snap looking down. Peas aren't all seeds. Let the red ground eat. And this last one is a little long and all over the place and Madonna's in it again. I just realized. It's called the body. You keep reading about this woman you don't know. Maybe you knew back in J school. It was J school, so really, details you should remember. This woman disappeared. People some you know you know are memorializing and celebrating her work. They say she was smart, fearless, always smiling. Divers found her head today. And suddenly you realize you didn't know it was missing. You didn't know what happened. You scrolled but stopped to read a funny post about Project Runway. Thought about Heidi Klum, how her nickname was the body. You always thought that was weird. Heidi Klum sold makeup too, which required a face or at very least a smile to attach to a body. Tim Gunn is your hero. The name of the woman you don't know is Kim. Was Kim. You should have remembered another Kim in your cohort, but she's not familiar. Not even when you see her headshot in the email for the memorial at your school. There have been a few. She was maybe your age but strawberry blonde. And when she took the photo, maybe there was a fan in the room or she just turned her head for the flash at exactly the right time, which is hard to do. She was floating and simultaneously engulfed by strands of orbiting amber flames crystallize aglow. You remember Madonna? Hair floating the same way in the Live to Tell video. There was a Project Runway contestant, Stella, who'd pronounced leather without the R, which you didn't pick up at first because you're from New York, but then you saw how that was funny, how it became a joke, how people can be funny without even trying. If being funny just means people are laughing at you. You'd watch Project Runway in bed with this man with blue and red snake tattoos, who also secretly loved him gun and Stella. He had a thick Boston accent that tickled as you'd both slowly clue leather back at the screen. Once through vodka breath, he told you the only reason you were in his bed, your body, he could take or leave your smile. Snake skin is leather, turns out turning out cattle isn't the only way it could be any hide. Snake skin can be expensive, tends to cost more when there's an ornamental head attached to the skin of what used to be a complete body. It took probably a month or maybe more than months from what you could tell from what people you vaguely knew were saying. Securated clicks, round yellow faces, a single tear, more than a month to figure out if it was an accident. You were just skimming. Suppose maybe she fell off the boat for a while, you thought it could have been negligent. She could have been drinking, partying, smiling on the boat when something bad happened, no one's fault. Make it work is what Tim Gunn would snap at contestants and why he's your hero. People try. Turns out Kim was reporting about a man on his boat, the way you learned in J school, studying a man in his natural habitat. One of the news stories you finally ingested said this man had mad fantasies about women's heads, mutilated torsos, burnt bodies. Kim was probably killed by this man, this man she probably didn't know before she got on his submarine, a sub, not the dreamboat you envisioned. And you know, you didn't know what happened, you scrolled, but you didn't know the story at all. Thank you.