 Greetings. Hi, I'm Jeffrey Gio Bryan, the director of lunch poems. I'm really happy to have all of you invisible people out there or in here having made the good decision to let your day be interrupted by an incredible poet, Roger Reeves. We're really happy to have him here with us. I'm just going to talk a little bit about his poetry and then hand it over to Roger who will read for about 30 minutes or so. In a poem from Roger's 2013 book King Me, called Brazil, which is prominently about diaspora, the speaker considers sort of competing with someone to whom he's speaking about the sort of inventory of national traumas and suffering and regionalized suffering that is black in its character and then basically decides not to compete for that kind of suffering award because it's so deeply distributed everywhere. And there's this incredible moment where when he decides not to indicate all the things that have happened in the US around anti-blackness, he says, the symphony hall of atrocities in which every seat is full. This is an amazing moment for entering Roger's work in general because it speaks not only to the desire to witness, document, critique, and reenter spaces of suffering historically and present. But also because he can't do that without thinking about art, right? It's not the warehouse of atrocities, right? Or the military base of atrocities. It's the symphony hall. It's not even clear whether every seat is filled by those who have suffered or filled by the atrocities themselves and sometimes there isn't a complete or distinct difference between persons and suffering and atrocity. Which is to say Roger is always thinking about how art can be used to document, enact, revisit pain and pleasure in ways that aren't mere aestheticization that don't guild, that don't only decorate. In Roger's poems, the casket is open, bodies are decomposing, although decomposition is of course the condition of future life. There's a moment when he's talking to children in a poem and he says, you must, I think, grow wildly upon the graves like grass does. So in Roger, we're always going to hear intense thick music, intense patterning, even as he takes on all of those things that disrupt our attempts to produce stability and pattern in our lives. Or when he's taking on the horrific patterns that trade and traverse and attack our lives. I think I'm just going to end there and let you hear what I'm talking about. Roger, over to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So, my name is Roger Reeves, as has been said, I just want to give you a little bit of the ambience that we're in. It's thundering and lightning here in Austin, Texas. So you might catch some of that in the background. We are in the middle of quarantine slash the summer, the end of the summer of unrest that hopefully will continue in terms of the protesting. And so, and also my daughter might come down at any time out of her nap and disturb or enter, right, let's not bother disturbance enter, and so enter with us so just giving you a little bit of background, what we might be contending with. So I'm just going to launch in. And let's go. Grendel. All lines must lean into something other than a roar. James Baldwin, for instance, singing Precious Lord. His voice is weary as water broken over his scalp in a storefront sanctified churches baptismal pool. All those years ago, when he wanted to be somebody's child. And on fire in that being. Lord, I want to be somebody's child and chosen water spilling over their scalp. Water, taking the shape of their longing. A deer diving into evening traffic in the furrow drawn in the air over the hood of the car power and wanting to be something alive and open. Lord, I want to be alive and open. A glimpse of power, the shuffle of a mother's hand over a sleeping child's forehead, as if clearing the city's rust from its face, which we are mostly are a halo of rust, a glimpse of power. James Baldwin leaning into the word light, his voice jostling that single grain in his throat, as if he might drop it or already has. I'm calling to that grain of light to that gap between his teeth, where the many of us fatherless sleep and bear and be whatever darkness or leaping thing. In James Baldwin's mouth, my difficult beauty, my weak and worn, my future as any number of angels, which is not unlike the beast, Grendel coming out of the wild heaven into the hills and halls of the meat house at the heart this call with absolute prophecy in his breast and a desire for mercy for a friend and end to drifting in loneliness and in that coming down out of the hills out of the trees for once bringing humans, the best vision of themselves, which of course, must be slaughtered. Fragment 107. Do I long for my virginity, Sappho asked from the fragments from the sun bright blades and horns of dawn clattering on the floor. From inside a tomb, her office now the old heaven of pleasure, where a God that had been ignored can be called down with its peers and oblivion to a couch or field and submit a body, a lover to the distress of love. And the God comes because God's too need and are lonely and are generally unneeded, accepted matters that cannot be mastered, which are most matters and the shadow of those matters from what you call Sappho. Do I long for my virginity. Why, why Sappho, this marble beneath my tongue, this shadow, this stone across my face, this 30 year memory spreading out over me, as if I could forget its claws confusion. It's flashing bells in violation, the virtue, the virtue of violation. Is there no end. Is there no end to the bed, the wall, her hand across my mouth, her hand plummeting me like a stone, like a stone I did not want her across and down and against me. Is there no end, no way to drive this from me, me arriving bewildered boy naked below the waist in the dark untouched forever awaiting a touch. Do I long for my virginity Sappho confession. I long, I square, I mail, I roach, I think, I cock, I crawl, I hair and hair all over the stairs, unable to give a precise account of my virginity or where, where is the end of speaking to the dead of the brutal obligations of memory. Where, where is the end of being who I was, who I am, who will waking me from the dark from dawn yell, Roger, Roger, you are yet alive and mostly, mostly free for black children at the end of the world and the beginning. You are in the car burning beneath the highway and rising above it. Not as smoke, but what calls it to rise. Hey black child, you are the fire at the end of your elders weeping fire against the blur of horse hoof stick stone several plagues, including time. Chrysalis hanging on the bow of this night in the burning world. Burn, baby, burn. Anvil and iron be thy name, yea though ye may walk among the harness heat enhancement who bear their master's hunger for paradise and your rabbit death in the beheading of your ghost. You are the healing snake in the heather bursting forth from your humps of sleep in the morning, your tongue moves along the earth naming Hawk sky rabbit run your tongue poison to the filthy democracy to the gold domed capitals with a guard in their grub worm colored uniforms cling to the blades of grass. Worm on the leaf, worm in the dust, worm, worm made of rust, sing it with me, dragon of insurmountable beauty, black child, laugh at the men with their hooves and borrowed muscle, their long and short guns, the worm of their faces, their casket assembling of the afternoon, left over leaves from last year's autumn scraping across their boots. Laugh, laugh at the assassins on the roofs for the time of the assassin is also the time of hysterical laughter. Black child, you are the walking on of water without the need of an approving master. You are in a beautiful language. You are what lies beyond this kingdom and the next and next and fire, fire black child. So yeah, so I'm reading some poems, you know, you're supposed to talk in between poems sometimes, but for some reason I just feel like reading. I don't know if it's just the steadiness of the rain. But I just feel like, let's just read together. Let's just sort of be here. It feels very, I feel very close to you. I don't know, even though I can't see nobody. This feels very intimate for some reason today, probably because this is my first reading doing something like this. And I feel like I'm talking to myself. So this one's called poem. And I think my homie so much for the title poem. Many are the names of the gods, and many the gods with no names. Many of the shadows cast by wasp plow, and many are born of shadows of wasp dying in the flesh of a fig of plow figging the flesh of the land. Many have come back to the land, the house of their former occupation, found their beds slept in their flower sifted baked into small loaves of bread, cooling on a white windowsill that once held salt and several mistakes, of which a rose was one. It sent still by the door. The rose is an old language of which the new masters believe better burned, buried, rightened by a cemetery wall, the corpse of which they are resurrected spine of the rose, less its thorns. I stay close to the rose in disaster for reasons still son up in the fig, the wasp dying in its rising rose. Tonight, the rose is an evasion of power. Of saying Palestine, the clinic in Hebron demolish days after the clinic is in the pandemic unaware, resting its way over summer, several mistakes, salt hills, and the people quarantine upon them, which is the wasp plowing the flesh of the fig, or is it the wasp in fig plowed under the shadow of power. God, pandemic, occupation, the is, is, is of Israel, my tongue, more willing to hold a rose than cut down the tree of this, because black hands make the American silver shine, whether held above our heads as in Heavenly Father, don't shoot or hanging on the handles of a plow. Black hands, silver the river, make shine, and the rose red peas on Sapello Island. If I get this wrong, then I get it wrong. The gods, the new masters, the rose in its old language, the gucci, my people trying to save their land from occupation from the new masters with a rose hidden inside a white hull. The dead still facing east in their graves. Tonight, the rose is evidence of power. After death, to get the light and dead coming through the window without distinguishing one from the other is the day with and without its mastery, stumbling upon a dead deer in a neighbor's field. Knowing it was left there for you, not his muse, but as memory dropped, broken off. Death no longer concerned with this beast that once covered a field with the white breath of its longing, because the animal is beyond death, and death has no interest in what is beyond it. So now it's off to stare at the barely standing there drunk, swaying beneath two sides, hanging on two boards above his raised eyes, the afternoon drifting into doorways. Death now in a pocket of pines in the thick hair of a boy who turns a skunk over with a stick, watching the Christmas of its intestines steam in the snow. Death touching the boy where it is, he will know him beneath the arm, as if raising him up to this common understanding. Desire is everywhere in this field, even in me, who was not in this field, but from my many windows, watching the night's dark light fall and dwell in its falling, which sends me stumbling to my newborn's invisible breathing, wanting to ensure my invisible holds, my thick branch finger stretched beneath her nose, me wondering, what is beyond death? And what is this rage in darkness? And my father, what is he other than dead? Rage in so much light, in so much light. Hope y'all doing all right out there. Keep it moving. We're going, I think this one will take us up a bit. We'll see. Into the West. It would seem clear that no one can call upon thee without knowing thee. Though Augustine, St. Augustine writes of God here, notorious for his absence. He could be speaking of desire. Pleasure, the tick of snow against the dry leaves, which sends my daughter spinning on her heel, the sound of it, that, Addy, that, sometimes the world, its lording joy is just a that, an absence that calls, demonstrates its overnairness, its being but without a proper name. So a silent sounded, as when I entered the clearing I once begged for, you, at an instant, absolute, and looking back at me, as if witnessing a calendar, a road you've already passed through. So my face now, whatever wolf, vulture, or golden horn of pleasure, that, a ticking of snow against the wet road. Nameless thee, where you've been and left the body of that being. So I, so I hurry and press into your leaving like a leaf, scuttling after the dream of itself, into the sharp wet of the snow against the skin. On into the West, where desire and sometimes pleasure is a type of faith, what you call me to in this spilling, this motion of night, your hair loose in the water of your back, your spine has become the eye you wish for me to see through. But I must close my two good eyes, which is the beginning of any apocalypse or rapture, our daughter, or the day, us touching the north and south of each other, without compass or rose, this stumbling, a type of faith to a scene, but without the dependence on site, or some heavenly ruin as signal of an end. It was like the deer outside, gathering at the window, looking the cold glass, the smoke. I think I'm gonna switch up the order a little bit. Let's see. Let's see what we got. Yeah, let's bring this one. Let's bring this one through. Yeah, let's bring this one through. I always have to have a little improvisation. So this is, this comes from this poem that I've been working on, where I was playing around with future, the rapper has the idea of fucking up commons. Real big fan of this notion of fucking up commons I think it can be used as like a sort of Marxist critique of capitalism right and go fuck with some commons they like, sort of a real interesting like critique, even though future doesn't mean is that future means we try to, you know, fuck up comments I get some money. I'm interested in the way that like, you know, this critique can be turned on his head or his, his lyric can be turned on its head and turn it to a critique. And so I was writing this poem, because I was trying to think through this and the death of Bert de César Flores, who was an activist and Honduras, who was killed. You know, and just thinking about these things and so I don't know if the whole poem will last but I do know that I do have this one section. That's kind of cool. Just to give you some of the illusion delusory moments. There's a quote I use from Jack Johnson. He was asked why do white women love black men so much. He said because we eat cold eels and think distant thoughts, which is a great, great response like that's the best response to a question that should never be asked I'm going to use that I use that anytime someone's asked me something I think it's stupid because because we eat cold eels and think distant thoughts. And Gertrude Stein appears. Try to think. There's any other oh there's another moment from Frederick Douglass that appears so there's all these sort of. I was just trying to be free when I wrote this poem so let's see if I if I got there. So future from beyond the voice of God. What shall be done with the demand for more selfies selfies of the crow in the wheat in the wheat knocking against the window selfies of my daughter hooting like an owl and beating the back of her cage, the back of her bones selfies of Wittgenstein's eyes settling on the back of a crow, which is the back of a boy delivering milk to the door of his mother where language began begins Gertrude Stein over the Stombergase eating salt fish and conch fritters with Amése Zaire, more selfies of Negroes from Niger New Orleans, blue black in the blue black in the winter of summer and East St. Laurent glasses and pinafores of light pinned to the eyes. No church in the wild, but more selfies of Susie Asada buck dancing on balustrades near the nigger cemeteries, where the chariot swung so low, we just called them commas. We bought the fuck up some commas yet. Jerry Mander and Jack Johnson the shit out of shit. Why do white women love black men, because we eat cold eels and think distant thoughts. We need more selfies selfies of Frederick Douglass his pen removed from the gashes in his feet and writing hot checks for Rolexes and Rivers, our bodies just can't cash weighed in the water weighed in the water children. We bought the fuck up some trauma yeah selfie and holler yeah Instagram at the ashram with little wheezy and Wardell Curry junior not senior bus in three pointers yet on behalf of a local charity that sends mosquito nets to children in Africa, the Sudan, Niger I don't know tiger tiger burning bright tiger tiger hanging from the street light distant thought I'm so in time. I'm out of time. So selfie. I'm healthy. I mean, I'm saying though, you know what I'm saying? Echo from the mountains. Unicorns brought the news of human reason to the border. So we gas them. It was unlike the echo of guitars and a stone cathedral or midnight crow landing snow in a field of wheat. Their deaths had a magpie's clarity for prophecy. In the bits of Maine, snag flags in the tines of the border fence, prophecy in the blood blotting the stones that winked at us as if saying you to you to will become the clock of your disappearance. Leviathan night stick tear gas the century barely beyond its birth rattle had become a banker riding the green back of a brown stallion to dust and bone. Who will shoot the century in the heart. Who will take a selfie with the corpse wearing a sign that reads your selfie will not save you from your corpse. It's ruptured spleen it's begging and blank labor. Every century falls below the imagination of itself, then takes the shape of its falling 401k Roth IRA short term bond funds for his fire. A crow is the emperor of any domain that capitulates to the whistle and weather of crows. No angel will come and bear these migrant deaths beyond this bird in human reason. Someone called it a miracle, the gassing that it could be done remotely with various devices and no one harmed. Another who is dead said it reminded him of getting a haircut on Good Friday. One man closes his eyes and another cuts it off. The mark of visibility is often mistaken for the mark of absence. All desire is shaped by the delusion of consent. Who has not been an entryway shattering in the wind of another's want arose, nailed to some dark longing and bled. All right, I'm gonna be out of to Paul morning. So we can focus back in get back here. American landscaping Philadelphia to Mount Vernon. Who would have thought too much simultaneously. This one planters hovering above the wind beaten statue of the Virgin Mary that cast her gaze down on the repainted lawn jockey. His brown face spreading out over his white cap, a small rebellion or merely an inarticulate hand over zealous and restoring race back to its place in God after winter makes he then the heaven of horticulture. This is America calling the golden pollen of spring blinging every available sedan stone porch puddle and satin blouse hanging from a smiling white line into yellow salvation or forgiveness. A black dog antique in its hunger for my daughter's hand through a fence. My daughter in her machine and wonder willing to give it is as if every moment is praying for whatever is above it or just outside its grass. The dog for a hand along jockey holding his absent lantern out in front of him for the Virgin whose eyes no longer there January to weigh by the blizzards salt and when stutter with a brown streak. I won't call bird shit, but rusted water dripping from the corrugated roof above. Even the flies in the earliest part of this sentence twitch above the sidewalk as if being accused of neglect and fantasize murder ending the empire in order to start another in their own image. But what is an empire fashioned in the image of flies. mistake. It's not a lantern the jockey holds out in front of him, but a black hitching ring for masters to tether the tamed, because they lacked mastering. It's not a jockey who stands on the wind and paving stones like jockel graves, the slave of general Washington, who froze to death, it unfolded in the snow on the banks of the Delaware River, his lantern out in front of him, awaiting his master's return. He was murdered in Washington, so moved by graves frozen obedience constructs a statue of dead graves, holding a lamp at his plantation home in Mount Vernon, even in death, a slave must labor, though I knew nothing of these clothes. I went on a ferris wheel, overlooking the muddy syringe and bottle banks of Philadelphia, I kissed the girl through the tin smog and chemical plant perfume and carry that kiss through the year touching newspaper edges of blankets, the backs of hamburger buns to my lips to remember the dimming summer, cheapishly backing out of the door, it hurriedly burst through only in America will the sons and daughters of slaves kiss the sons and daughters of their masters and remember it as an opportunity to be human. Thank you all for coming through on this rainy day for me, maybe a sunny for y'all. This is a new poem to this is called teresias at the end of the world, what she will tell you. If you kill her, when you kill her is that she is not dead. She knows no no other than this yes. So prepare your knives, your democracies, your utopias, built of holes in a winter coat, your banners of ecstasy are nothing but the black galls of a police station burning. She is set your banners of ecstasy on fire. She will stand next to the other women and dance with a sword in her hand. She builds beyond the whistling of death and the lion's head home in the tree. She is not like the hair trembling in the bell flowers praying through the spiders web to the rainbow after the flood. She is not the peaking rose pulling its head down through the hoof and hammer of the wind. She is presence in the hum of summer, the quiet sky and the loud cardinal flying in it, the green page for which all harvest rise. She is the future, not as the blur of the current spring shed away in the seat of the future. Even as a boy with griefs thrown shut up in her foot, she walked the uneven landscapes as a leaping fire as a sun deciding where to lay its brightness, not like the calf whose tongue caged in flame is set to prophecy by an angel. The calf recalling a vision for which he has not been invited to see only utter as is given some animals, partial ecstasy, partial horror, all vision, horror, ecstasy, the uttering calf, the angel, the deluvial light, the surge of suffering and the suffering lifted hers and ours. She hacks at the temples of heaven, sending it tumbling down upon us. She sleeps beside a cat in a window that looks out onto a solitary grave devotion disfigures both the living and the dead. It cannot be rented out like a tune. No region of the night, she says, is without its ecstasy. Thank you. Thank you, Roger. That was very beautiful. And I want to thank also to the Berkeley library for extending the support for this event, and to our AB support staff. Thank you. And I want you to extend also our thanks to everyone who made the time to join us in the middle of the day today. As a reminder, this is an ongoing series, and you can find details about our future events, the next of which will be on November 5th at our website, lunchpomes.berkeley.edu. You can also, from our website, navigate to our YouTube channel where you can find the extensive archive of Lunch Pomes series from past years. And you can also sign up for our mailing list. So thank you all for joining us, and thank you to our director, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, and to Roger. That was really, really beautiful. Thank you for joining us.