 We're live on YouTube and we're live in the room and I'm going to open the doors. Showtime, everyone. Hello and welcome everybody. Thanks for coming to this month's edition of Poem Jam with poet Kim Schuck. I'm John Smalley and I'm a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. While we're waiting for everyone to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community to tell you about a few of our upcoming programs and to inform you about free COVID resources. So on behalf of the Public Library, we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Aloni tribal people, and to acknowledge the many Ramatush Aloni tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside and work. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these families and community members, and we encourage you to learn more about first person rights. That's the politically popular thing to do now. On behalf of the Public Library, I also wish to let you know about the Summer Stride Literacy Program, which began on June 1, and will run through August 31. Summer Stride is the library's annual summer learning, reading and exploration program for all ages and abilities. Join us for author talks, reading lists, book giveaways, nature experiences and more. You can register today and I will put the link in our chat. On Monday, just a few days from now, the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival screens their film, takes on Romeo and Juliet. The film explores the balcony scenes from Romeo and Juliet. As we assume it should be played, followed by various directorial takes based on gender norms in the 16th, 19th and 21st centuries. The film will be followed by live Q&A with the director Chris Steele. On Monday, June 21, San Francisco's Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen Martin will host a conversation between authors Marlin Peterson and Kisei Lemont about Peterson's new book, Bird Uncaged, an abolitionist freedom song. This event, the one I just mentioned, is one of dozens of amazing author talks that we are presenting this summer. Come here, authors discuss their bestselling novels, their books on cooking, on art, on rock and roll, not to mention San Francisco Poet Cesar Love discussing his book on baseball and astrology. We'll also have author talks on politics, prison reform, Muslim American writers, and a special program in July hosted by author and editor Kim McMillan. The program is of Afrofuturist writers inspired by the Marvel Comics character, The Black Panther. Also in coming weeks, talks by art historian Carla Huebner on Czech surrealism and by the San Francisco Chronicles film critic Nicholas Sal on California New Movies. So there's lots of great programs coming your way. Be sure to check our website's event page. SFPL to go continues. This is our curbside service at the main library and half of the branch libraries. You can place books on hold items on hold or CDs movies. And we will notify you when they are ready to pick up the first and second floors of the main library are now open seven days a week. As are the Chinatown and Mission Bay branches, computers and printing services are again available at these branches as well. Lastly, if you live in San Francisco and still need to get vaccinated, you can use these websites to find out where vaccinations are available in your neighborhood. I will put these web addresses in the chat also. So that ends my announcements. I'll now turn the microphone over to our beloved poet and the poem jam series organizer, Kim shock, take it away Kim. Thank you john and thank you anisa and the public library for basically indulging me in this way and continuing to do so. Just to note, this particular event whether or not the library would have made it a common practice would be having land acknowledgments one way or the other. Not because it's politically cool but because I am Native American, and I have a particular contract with the native people here to make sure that I'm not ignoring their presence. So just so that that's clear. I am delighted with the readers that we have today. I often say that I program these events to please myself, which is a thing that the library allows me to do and I love that they let me do that. But in this case these are all four of the people I love listening to. They're all four of them people I love listening to their friends, either of long standing or a recent standing and I believe that Rupa is has attended more poem jams than anybody but me. I think that includes john smally who had to take a short break at one point. So, possibly, it's close. Anyway, I'm delighted you're all here. So, we're doing this particular reading. Because I think it's always good to bring attention to writers. In moments when they might be having either personal or reflected stress, because I think we say our biggest and most important truths to hear in those moments it's not always the easiest time. But, but I think it's usually a good idea. So, I was hoping that we could get to niche car to kick us off. I met to nation poetry workshop and have consistently been impressed by her writing her almost surgical honesty in her writing. And, and I'm, I'm just delighted to have you here and I can't wait to hear your words to niche color. Thank you, Kim. I have two older poems and then to newer ones related to COVID the COVID crisis over there. So the first one is the ribbons of Icarus is femininity a mystical element and natural force. I still don't spell correctly on the first time. It gets forgotten chopped, have like the laborious double double the very thing elongating the delicacy, delectability of what the symbol, the letters stand for. The letters that stand for something humanity doesn't seem to. We are floating ribbons frayed on the sides the side edges rounds blacks grays greens spreads purple intense rich palates of politics against the sky. Tied to balloons waiting for the moment to cut or wither another or other. The colorful coats of beleaguered balloons millions of Icarus is leading us all to sundew seldom looking around or down at us rhythms. They string along to start femininity into famine. We float and ripple stretch adapt moment by moment to their blind madness. What is all this wartime rage prowling power of impending doom them get released. We with diamond studied smiles to distract the children from seeing that which they can already feel our broken hearts, our private bodies mutilated in secret surgical meetings of female rage we've all absorbed over the beauty of femininity. It's not only elastic, secular magic yet ecclesiastic. If your religion is nature, which minus. Did I just tinge some visceral muscle of yours. You've used once and for all to see and clip my feminine body like laundry over a drying line. I celestial mind and earthly conviction. There's that collective anger again to collective blindness collected in my unseen cells awaiting my impending doom. Horizon dissolves tower of ivory, the ivory tower lets you do whatever you want, eventually. Imagine your life on high. Unambitions for this torn society can stitch it back together. Woman with authority. But first you must buy your differential place here with ancestral Hindustan blood. Britannic initiation to Anglo servitude. Conceive yourself, let your audacious demi-urgic desires root on stolen land. You borrow. A phenomenon of some trees anyone with working eyes can see called crown shyness. That is the cannabis of trees fully stopped, meaning fully grown, given the resources available, avoid touching. So you can see curved lines of blue sky outlining the top outline branches. Lines of sky like avenues, separating different trees, communities, you lie on your back in a forest. Reach the sky through an ivory tower, but you have to play a twisted game of belonging without belonging to get there. Because they don't want you for what you create, for what flourishes from your fecund mind, what's yours alone, your cosmic co-creation, artistic donation to wounded mankind. But they'll let you take what's theirs all day, their laws, medicine, physics, study those wherever, and regurgitate. Like bald baby birds, like model minorities, enforce their tight-fisted order, serve up their inhumane synthetic pills on a party platter, mash it up, eat up the applesauce and call it success. But feminine artistry must be tangled up in white ivy. A cannon, a cannon, male artillery embedded in blooded soil, sanguine suffering of innate humanity, glistening blackness indigenous, offering fertilizer for further generational resistance to casual and bridal whiteness. Keep your flesh close for ink-wielding freedom for when you feel the sky is a blank page of possible potential. Up there where you're all considerate of one another's space, branches free of encroachment. Then rain restorative tears graciously with your fountain pen, heal the endlessly giving earth, people, guiding spirits, who like you have suffered, suffer, will suffer. But the way up is anything but symbiotic and symbiosis, imagine, imagination, creation, school-age historians, black, Native, white, Latin, Arab, Asian, learning their own troubled histories, shades of colors, traditions, earthly struggles, atrocities, triumphs, heroic journeys of families, relatives, collectives, gathering their past, passing it down to open-ear classmates who do the same. Multi-color history books, interweaving multi-author lineages into a shared chronology say, we are never alone, it is a human right to control our own dignified narratives. Imagine again impressionable children, soaking up how to honor fight for themselves one another, stand up for dignity and respect for themselves and their communities, and then doing so with simple action. Pulling down the protective sky to snuggle, cradle the child, hiding under the desk, head nestling on a cloud instead of buried in the corner of the room. Feverish intentions, sneezing love into their palms and fingers, offering them up to a neighboring stranger, a classmate to borrow and return from the library of infectious love hands. Hopeful admiration for the horizon, the horizontal future only they together can author. Consider, would it even be a tower in this case? Natural, right? Not man-made? A landscape? Fields, mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, yes, maybe. Next one is called clearing this other disease. Hindu nationalism, anti-humanism, white power in a different color. Another language, religion, God's gifts, used to divide, conquer, patrol, like trolls. A disease you can't control, not without a heart anyway, or love, or lungs to breathe into and for the people. So Modi lacking all of these generous organs controls the people instead, conditions them to lean on his lies, legs to trample in herds over the vulnerable while enduring their own suffering. So thunders the herd. As long as I'm stepping on someone with someone, I'll be okay. But who is okay really? In a nation reduced to funeral pyres. I had a skin cream from jargons that smelled of India. This nourishing lotion drained of its last dribble. Bottle of toothpaste, too, all twisted and folded up, was such a powerful manipulator provoker of my memory. I blacked out in my room in San Francisco and found myself in relaxing in my cousin's house in Chandigarh, Chao in hand, Masala mountains through the nose. This ointment all used up, and though I've misplaced the bottle, I kept it for years, because just clicking it open and taking a whiff was enough to send me over. It's nice to travel to the other side of the world without moving. That dose of comfort I'll tell you does not smell like fire. Fire does not smell different on a Hindu body than a Muslim body. And suffering to transcend language, religion, and all people need and grieve and breathe and bleed. No, Modi's India is not just or true, but it is reality for everyone living and dying there. This should sound familiar. Human straw men hovering over a field of their own people as sturdy as hay classless men of a disintegrating class toxic phallic overseers through from squandering resources fumbling down through a crisis. A natural disease exposing these dangerously incompetent frightened frightened scare close unearthing age old insecurities. Social injustices and aptitudes. With no coincidence or accident at the US and India are the two most affected nations by COVID in the world. Modi, the Trump of India Bolsonaro, Radar Johnson, the same pals in a pie with devilish smiles as their countrymen burn. Amused by the gasoline covered supremacy fever they blitz watching it spread with the other virus. The lighting in the fire twinkling in the reflection of their eyes. When a people have nothing they clean to whatever they can start them up necessities spoon feed them ancient prison. And you get civil war race, color past religion you get the US and India. No one tell me why there and here. We hear doctor and see Indian on TV in the news in hospitals why we force feed medicine. To our innocent Indian children that it's the only way forward. Both nations bumble so badly through the greatest medical crisis probably of the last few hundred centuries, few hundred years sorry. My ancestors visit me every day. The birds come to comfort me. Butterflies humming birds show off to show me the beauty of nature. They come to say we're all one being. Earth's core is all of our beauty card. No one should have to sell their life's work to save their life this corporatized vaccine exposes the sickness. What we forgotten, since we first saw and surrendered to the sun soothing light. I do know that at our best humanity is love. We are respectful and dignified, capable of standing in our humble power and not overpower. In our difference we must show deference to the universe all in and of it. Let love rain all over. Let its tears drown hate. Leave straw men limp and impotent. A COVID vaccine grow in the clearing. Give breath to all people. Art a higher writer arc. This is the last one. There's no hierarchy and Sikhism proper say the ten gurus. Yet age profession money earned a cast of its own shadows the young. The girl. The woman. The artist respect a reservoir for medicine. But India breeds art colors of turmeric cinnamon cardamom coriander. Spinach and sardis linga silver studio. Dingling on the street. Eyelashes on tuk-tuk. Ganesh is dangling from mirrors. I bring too many traditions. Carnatic cadence. Muted by two centuries of patient-patient. Leaving an overcast of merciless social expectation. Cabernet education. Worthless wages in their wake. But you still see wealth. In beauty glowing ornate inspiration to write a colorful poem. Sing a miracle song. The street stands again. Thank you. Well, lady, you got me. Thank you for that. Remarkable. Group of poems. One of the reasons that this reading is taking place right now is because it felt really important. If you watch the news at all or listen to the news at all just at the moment really any news any news of any kind. And I know that there's some real struggle going on. In India. And I wasn't seeing a lot of artistic response to it, but you will get some today. Also, I just want to make a point that. I realized in my arrogance that I didn't ask people how they wanted to be introduced. And so when I was introducing to niche, I just avoided doing it in this way. And I think that's what I know because I'm, you know, indigenous. Southeastern indigenous. Western hemispherian. That any place that's constructed by colonialism. Makes identity words both very important and difficult from the outside. I just sort of apologize for not having checked in with everyone about that. I should know better. I do know better. I'm just, I failed to do it. That, you know, we all have our ways we like to be referred to. And I'm pretty sure I'll be forgiven by the readers since they all are friends. So. Anyway, I'd like to move forward. I'm going to start with Tamina Khan. Who. All identity words aside is. Has been a teacher. At city San Francisco city college in the. Poetry for the people program. I have invited her to read for all number of reasons. She's a. Pretty tireless advocate for education of all kinds and. And one of the people I was missing really ferociously when we couldn't see human beings in person. So please welcome to the microphone to be an icon. Okay, thank you very much, Kim. Namaste. And I, you know, when Kim, when you asked me. When you send out this email. I said, yeah, sure. Great. And then I, you know, it's, it's like, you know, but, but I've been away from India so long. And I really miss it. And I haven't written lately very much about India and Tanish that was amazing. Thank you. Your poems are so beautiful. And you brought me there. You brought me right there. With your, you know, with everything with your imagery. The beauty and the pain. It's just. India is overwhelming. So I have a couple of poems and I'm going to, I'd actually like to start with a poem for Kashmir. That I wrote. At the beginning of the blockade in Kashmir. Before the pandemic. So, I call this Kashmir song. I call this Kashmir song. Verdant valley mountains rise above a wide cool lake. Crisp air morning mist. Bollywood backdrop for song filled romance. Women weaving Pashmina shawls embroidering them with silk, pastelies and vines. I've covered my sleeping child with your finally woven shawl that I'm wearing. They've cut off your internet radio stations, even the network of landline wires. I've heard your song from generations past. I've sipped it brood in your milky tea and tasted it in your glorious apricots cooked into a decadent dessert. The blackout cannot black this out. They've surrounded you with heavy boots. They've taken you to the heavens because you dare to shout. Decades ago at the exhibition in Heather by the city far to the south. I bought your embroidered fabric and large silver earrings. I hold them now and hear your song. I took California tulips to Huma after her father's death. These are the flowers of Kashmir. She told me. She's a great singer. She sings with her soul on her rooftops. From the cool black earth what stories sing to us now? Whose bones deep in the earth sing Allah Hu Akbar to the divine. O Kashmir, we need your song now. Sing past the occupiers' guns, past the kidnappers of women and children. Sing to the disappeared, the raped, the tortured, the murdered. the orphans and corpses alike. Sing your budgins and rezzles, hip hop fusion beats, long wailing laments, remixes of heart beats laid into the night. Sing past the blockade, past the blackout over mountain peak across ocean and continent. Sing your pain, your grief, sing your Azavi, sing and even I will hear you. You will not disappear. Azadi. As I'm reading this, I'm thinking about a couple of my students in Burma right now, and I'm thinking about them and I'm sending that to them. I don't know. I've sent some messages, or, you know, two Muslims in Burma who've taken my classes and I haven't been able I haven't heard anything from them. So I'm just putting that out there. This poem is poem for my dad. He turned 90 in December, during the pandemic. And right right before that, I was I'm actually in his house right now. He's actually in the Dominican Republic. Long story. My parents are on vacation. Really glad. Really glad for them. But I'm holding the house down and staying with my with my older sister who has autism. So this is a poem I wrote for his 90th birthday that I've still been working on after his 98th birthday. So anyway, 90th, not 98th. That's, you know, inshallah, we'll get there. But pomegranate tree, red globes hang heavy on brand bare branches. You break open the leathery shell, peel back the dimpled membrane, separate out ruby seeds, which explode sweetness in our mouths. I remember tall poplars, golden leaves shimmery and falling. You raked them into crunchy piles, where our cats would jump and pounce. Iris bulbs, tulip tulip bulbs, poppy roots sleep in the terrace rose. You watch and wait for the rainbow to blossom into spring. Fig tree, transplanted from the old house long ago, waits, promen promising us late summer sweetness. You tend to all the trees with kindness and water. Each plant has its season. You have held each child in your firm leathery hands. You break open the fruit for all to taste. 90 journeys around the sun. And you have grown into the wisdom you always had. And we watched the moon wax and wane. In this alien place, you built a home on stories and prayer, soft words, strong hands, flowers and trees. When we cannot be patient, you are patient for us. The trees do not know they are living through the pandemic of 2020. They only remember you gave them water during the drought. The trees like us are grateful for your care. In a pandemic year, you hold up your hands and cradle us in your prayers. And this is a poem that I wrote today. When Kim said we're going to do poem jam for India, I said, okay, I'm going to write something. And I'm a procrastinator. So I did it today. So here we go. It's called We Learn to Live with the Dead. This is not the beginning. This is not the end. A pandemic in a world of epidemics, we learn to live with the dead. One parent, one grandparent died of dysentery. Another of hepatitis. Two uncles died of lung cancer. We learn to live with the dead. My auntie died during the first wave, not of COVID, but surrounded by COVID in a hospital the day before Eid. Far away from her, the morning of Eid. We hear her daughter's call. And I remember that she is my favorite. Her husband, my father's brother died young when their daughters were small. They learned long ago to live with the dead. In this new time of pandemic, their daughter, my cousin, and her children get the virus and survive. We all got malaria, my mother says, and typhoid and cholera. Some died and many lived. We buried them in white shrouds and learned to live with the dead. My father reminds me that he lived with dead before he was born. Three baby sisters who did not survive. A memory of an uncle who died in the pandemic of 1918. A young man who remains young, who never met the ones who remember who live with the dead. My husband's uncle died of racism when a white hospital in Oklahoma refused to treat him. My uncle my husband, my husband bears his name and has lived his whole life with the dead. 100 years after the Tulsa massacre, the war on black excellence continues. My son carries the dead with him as soft whispers on his shoulder. This is not the beginning. This is not the end. We learn to live with the dead. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you. Can't really follow that. Except that I'm going to say that Tamina has with all of the readers today, had poems in the poem of the day project, rummage around and find what they submitted for that. Everybody, there's a lot of great work in that project. Our next reader is Rupa, who is an incredible poet and has been really a stalwart of the poem jam. And I'm half tempted to talk to tell a story about about one of our meetings, but I think I'm going to let that go and just let the reading continue. I have now cried more than I have at any of the memorial readings that that have happened. I mean, tearing up now. Anyway, Rupa, please share your words with us. Thank you, Kim. And thank you, Tanisha and Tamina, for your great readings and powerful words. Beginning to learn the language of the tiny virus invading lungs, preventing me from visiting India, where my close to 85 year old father lives, each across alone across oceans, but now flights stopped connection only on the phone, beginning to learn the language of fear, uncertainty, not knowing. Here the news, my school librarian, teacher mentor, someone living in the building my father lives in, I grew up in hospitalised. Remember the last time we met, she gave me confidence after my divorce, recalling her own daughter. She said anyone can be married, not anyone can be a mathematician, making me take a magnifying glass to my talents. And now she's on oxygen in a hospital. All I can email her daughter is my concern. And beginning to learn the language of this virus, going door to door, any day grabbing any of us, shattering and moving on. And me now examining my life, while in Mumbai, where my father lives, the pandemic exploding, now not in the slums, but in the multi story buildings. In my father's building, 15th floor woman died of COVID, my mentor hospitalised, and I hear of oxygen and short supply, learn words like oxygen concentrator, and virus with triple mutation. I'm fluent in the language I never wanted to learn, and don't want to think the worst. You come to a place where social distancing cannot work. Slums and small flats, many people living piled up in a single room. One person gets COVID. How does the person isolate at home? You come to a place where people live hand to mouth. Daily wages needed to put food on the table. Lockdown to keep the virus from spreading. But the day laborer, the small time shopkeeper, the maid cleaning the house, no income, will they survive? How will they feed the children? You come to a place where there's no unemployment insurance, where people dying of COVID abandoned on the streets. You come to a place you still love, still call home, where you grew up. But now you come to a place, even though flights are cancelled, you cannot really be there. You come to a place now Mumbai, now India, COVID hotspot. You come to a place where vaccines manufactured, once exported to African and other developing countries. You come to a place where now COVID vaccines in acute short supply, only 5% of a population of a billion vaccinated, 80 year old standing for ages to be vaccinated. You come to a place, a mixture of fear, panic and resignation. You come to a place that will still always be home. Only when you have given up, and can only take it day by day, only when you have given up, cannot control when you'll get the second shot vaccine shot, you 85 went once, doctor said 42 days, not 45 after the first shot, come back again. But in India vaccines open to 18 year olds and supply shortage acute, you went again stood in line, your 85 year old legs notwithstanding, and told that madame comma hospital run out of Kobe shield come back again, and went again to madame comma hospital. Don't know if you got the vaccine this time. And even with the uncertainty pandemic overblown, your 85 year old voice still urging me scared post divorce, fearful of not finding anyone to never give up, or to give up trying to control outcomes. What shall I do with all this heartbreak? COVID in India grabbing those I know, and those I don't. Today my once dear friend's birthday, her mother in Mumbai last year, a COVID casualty. On the global public square, even celebrity news people, Fareed Zacharia tribute to his mother, COVID casualty again, and he could not go to bury her. Barkha that fearless journalist, her father and other COVID casualty, and how many faces known and unknown. Another of my friend's mother, passing in indoor, she could not be there. And my heartache alone, not knowing when if I can visit my father, not called by other relatives, how can I describe my own breakdown, fear of growing old alone, or with someone not suitable, my mental paralysis and fears, when day to day they're struggling to get the vaccine, don't know what the next day will bring, if there will be a next day. And what shall we do with all this heartache? expose the wounds to let them heal or bury them. Stop the words now. COVID disaster, no oxygen out of beds in the ICU. One bright Dr. Rajendra Bharuth, tribal from Beale, son of a single mother, toiling in the fields of landowners. Now the collector in Nandurbar, tribal dominated area of Maharashtra, determined to stop those words, COVID disaster, no oxygen out of beds in the ICU. This 33 year old doctor, now IAS officer, got oxygen plant installed in five hospitals, spread in the district, 2000 beds added between first and second wave, and stop the words place of illiterate tribal villages, the son of a single tribal mother toiling the fields, now a doctor, a district collector, a sole bright light, while big metropolis in India struggling with people dying on the streets, lack of oxygen concentrators and ICU beds, shown stop the words, stop the stereotypes. Meanwhile, the world goes on. While I single struggle day to day, not knowing at 53, if I'll ever find someone post divorce, to fill the void, the fear, the panic. Meanwhile, the world goes on. While COVID quake is shaking India, in town cities and everywhere, livelihoods lost, maids without housework, wondering how to feed themselves and their children. Meanwhile, the world goes on. More vaccines now in developed countries, restaurants open for outdoor dining, gathering with friends and family. Meanwhile, the world goes on. While I have no partner to share a life with solitary single locked in my prison, my apartment, in pandemic times, now slowly stepping out. Meanwhile, the world goes on. While those grieving their lost loved lost loved ones lost to COVID, the empty space at the dining table, assuming they can even afford a dining table, the hollow in the heart, the loss of the only bread winner. And meanwhile, the world goes on. Corona a guzzle, an invisible one tiny trauma. Now everyone knows you fears you Corona. You were the conqueror, the feared, the crusher of dreams, or how you shatter Corona. In India, in Mumbai, you mutated mercilessly. Change form became more feared. Oh, Corona, bodies and graveyards unnamed, heaps dying on the street, no relative or friend. Oh, brutal Corona. People pleaded for oxygen. No hospital beds for the sick. You ravaging Corona. How similar is the sound of you to compassion or Corona. But oh, how cruel you are. Oh, Corona. Elegy to Corona's clutch, cannot go back, see the white hair aging eyes, have the shoulders hunched more, the legs more unsteady. But I cannot see he who taught me the importance of exercise, walking me in marine drive, consoling me on my divorce, visiting when plane flights through long 22 hours with backs constrained in small spaces, they're only constrained. And now I think of days when men, and they were men in those days, sailed to England for studies, not visiting family for so many years, stuck across continents, 1918, World War One, and the influenza pandemic. And maybe just maybe I realise, I still have my cell phone to keep connection, even though the flights are frozen, and in India, 40,000 deaths a week, and millions infected, COVID was disaster since 1920 famine, which at least could be blamed on the British. And this is the last one, letting go of the ground we stand on, as COVID clutches, but Haryana IS officer, Sonipad District Collector Shyamlal Punea, even as the ground moved under him, his daughter on a ventilator, his wife and he himself hospitalised COVID-19, still from his hospital bed, actively engaged in pandemic management measures in the district. Even as the ground quaked under them, the district increased capacity of medical oxygen, with oxygen audits at bottling plants and hospitals, installing new oxygen plant commissioning another, empowering nodal officers conducting COVID testing in villages, setting up control rooms for booking ambulances, staffed by volunteer teachers and computer operators, arranging for oxygen cylinders, the district collector of farmer's son, still trying to create and build while the ground he stood on was cracking wide open. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rufa. You just reminded me my great grandmother died in the influenza pandemic and also that my grandfather used to one of his big curses, the one he liked to use the most was wishing people ill, like sick. That's how he swore. Part of the thing that keeps striking me about what's going on right now with COVID, not the pandemic itself, but sort of the political surroundings of it is all the people who are struggling to get breath, and that that's been a theme for a couple of years solid is that there are just people who apparently the powers that be don't think it's important to have breathing. And it really struck me when one of the reports of the pandemic in India at present was talking about people going and looking for oxygen, which just I don't know, it's going to be a poem eventually, but it's just a little too raw at this point. So we were sort of hoping to put up link for people if they felt like donating. We have a really low turnout for the reading tonight. So when this goes up on the library site, I think I'm going to tap the folks here I know who have pretty good social media networks to get it passed around. It's been a remarkable reading so far. And I feel very confident as I introduce our final reader, it's not going to drop from that at all. So it has always taken my breath away in a good way, not a bad way with her poetry. As in, the breath that gets taken away before you take a big one in and get inspired, the real meaning of the original meaning of inspiration to take in there. Love her work. I love her book. And I think I will just hand it over to her now, please welcome Preeti Vangani to the to the microphone. Thank you for being here, love. No, thank you. Thank you for having me. And wow, I have no words for everyone who went before me. Thank you for your words. Thank you for bringing your hearts to thinking about home. I'm home. I'm far away home. I haven't been able to do it as directly as you all have to my poetry just yet. Looking in depth in the eye is that has always been very hard for me. I could not witness the death of my mother. When I was 22, she passed away. I couldn't witness the death of my grandfather, who passed away in October last year. And he was perfectly fine. So suspected COVID but his tests were negative. And, you know, it was also not on his side. But who knows what is false positive and false negative anymore. But I'm gathering ancestors at a rate. I did not think I would in this as past in this lifetime with, you know, growing up amid science. And yet seeing folks back home suffer from vaccine hesitancy, the propaganda passed on by the government, folks signing up to WhatsApp University and believing false messages about vaccines harming them. I did not grow up in an India like that. And it breaks my heart to see folks from home from my city Bombay and elsewhere fall free to an additive like this. Over the last month and a half, a few folks from the literary and performing arts community, a lot of lawyers, a lot of software engineers got together. All of us are volunteers. None of us is paid to do this. None of us gets likes, shares, subscribes to do this. But we developed a consolidated list of people, communities, groups who need money across states in India. So if you click on that site, whenever you can, and whenever you're capable of, you'll find a whole list of folks who are in need right now. And this is mutual aid, especially for communities who the virus has affected disproportionately, more than others, you know, I come from a lot of privilege. There are people I'm cast privileged, I'm cast and class privileged. But there are people whose lives have been even more amputee affected. And who have this proportionately suffered because of this virus. So if you can support folks from lower caste folks from lower classes, migrant workers, trans activists, trans workers, lesbian and gay communities who are all working class and don't have access to resources, masks, oxygen cylinders, I can't believe that I have to make this plea in 2021, where, you know, folks have to find out how to work an oxygen concentrator at home, if they are able to rent it, that is. But this is where we are. Over the last two weeks, I track all of the campaigns on this website regularly, I've noticed a significant downfall in contributions. Because like everything, COVID in India is a new cycle. Our attention to windows and folks think COVID is over, but it is far from over. And before I give you our poems, I promise you all three poems, I want to read just a little stanza from what I don't know I wrote in the Guardian two months ago. And he says India spends about 1.25% of its gross domestic product on health far lower than most countries in the world, even the poorest ones. Even that figure is thought to be inflated because things that are important, but do not strictly qualify as health care have been slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be more like 0.34 percent. A Lancet study also shows that 78% of health care in urban areas and 71% rural areas is now handled by the private sector. The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals, and insurance markets. Health care is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving sick dying people who don't have money. This massive privatization of India's health care is a crime. So to everyone who says the system has collapsed, the government has failed. The system hasn't collapsed. It is the government that has failed. And she says perhaps failed is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears and with repetition, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us, the indignity of it all. That is what breaks us. Um, with that spirit, I'm just going to urge everyone who ever sees this video, if you ever can, share the link mutuallyindia.com or go to it and if you can donate whatever you can. I'll do three poems today. This first one is called what bodies do. I pay sunflower stickers and a postcard to my teacher as workers refurbish gardens into makeshift crematoriums in New Delhi. Breath is a commodity now. It always has been. But now it's available in the shops. Those who can score oxygen cylinders over the black market between my daily walk and my daily grief. I lower my mask over the red line ready as a soldier by a patch of peonies. Dead with eyes open. It's for fresh and responsive to win, heathering its dome. I'll take anything to think better of death. Nello's happy campers, for instance, a book that imagines an exclusive heaven for beings who kill themselves. I rebelled in the chorus of ma who you're killing us. How we are bundled in a minivan would scream with joy ma who you're killing us getting busy as our uncle roller coaster does spinning donuts in the parkway after late night rides focused around Kulfi. His body was found breathless within that sweet circle in a shape nobody wants to remember. His steel watch intact ticking. What six floors cyclical debt and one unfenced jump will do to a man who religiously bought us a dozen overpriced opening night movie tickets. The teaser more promising than the film and the will to keep running the teaser. I mean, what I'm trying to say is I've never seen a rat with eyes more open. One way than the other. Every morning I rotate my arthritis run wrists to let my blood know I'm still here to move it. And I acknowledge the rat each morning as if it lives. The second poem I'm so thankful to you Kim with your fantastic curation. This poem is also currently in the archives of the SF public library in the poor Monday section. It's called single with a side of quarantine. Sheldon plays shifts the communal access of the world closer to my kind of loneliness. The year I begged for a baby sister, my parents gifted me an electronic pet made in China. This morning, another friend meamed the whole Chinese race as the real virus. I watched my comforter panic pot eggs read a book erstwhile titled The Hall of Human Origins decided to block the friend. I had Christian my pet sister, a coral plastic fish with a scream for a belly infinity. I fed her when she squeaked hid her from disciplining nuns in school. Despite its mind numbing traffic and potholes deep as grief. I miss driving my dingy car on the Bombay ceiling tonight. I'm craving the salt soap wind to ravage my coconut oil pressed hair. I come from a blank page with just the word eroticism doodled in its center. These days, I wonder if I should sell the condoms I hold it at the women's clinic over the quarantine black market. My room is lit by ways of Billy buttons, yellow and dying bulbs that need no care. The week tastes like brown rice and broccoli. It is the 12 year anniversary of my mother's passing. It was hard for my dad to resuscitate infinity. No shop he said had the batteries we needed. There must be a room in the other world's architecture where one can sit for tea with the dead toy the unspeaking mother and the soul dinner rush first car. I hope they remember to stock honey and sugar there. Thank you again for having me for thinking of our community for putting this together. This last poem is called our bed with mother gone. And then it came back to me as I heard a young boy practice his violin under the concrete canopy of the parks amphitheater the Italian phrase dolce farney and they this weakness of doing nothing. Although this student was not not doing nothing the violin like a prayer press between his chin and shoulder are one virus that had perhaps pushed him out of home alone taking his lesson on his phone screen with no audience to applaud except a dad chasing his daughter chasing bubbles and isn't observing a toddler tailing bubbles the equivalent of sneaking in a mid morning nap. Oh yes, look how they were all occupied in their business of joy and I sat with a croissant so buttery I could seduce it. But really I was just tired of the news tired of counting the dead then remembering the dead I sat with coffee I didn't need I was beyond awake hallucinating the eucalyptus was my playful grandfather gone last week. Oh no, gone we knew when he wouldn't even eat soup. What is the feeling that the smell of trees fills one with which is so much like slowing down our pace wherever we were. So Grand Park would catch up. Dear world I prayed. Go slow today. Take one person less in your mortal stead. Lend us all an extra hour. Let's make no productive claim of calling it this time. A saving instead a stillness of feeling triumphantly useless like the my rate minutes spent looking through thick branches to spot the singing blue jay knowing the word like happiness will have flown elsewhere before you can trace the exact source of its little fulfilling music. Thank you. Thank you so much. My heart is so full. And I really hope folks can keep this action rolling and the conversation doesn't stop here. Wow. Thank you guys. Thank you all for bringing your hearts for bringing your words. I don't know how to respond to thank you for remembering our community. I feel like for one thing as Native Americans were people who got mistaken for you by the world and we end up getting called the same thing all the time. So I'm unlikely to ever forget. But also the current circumstances are so extreme the whole idea of we are one the whole idea of air being a commodity oxygen being a commodity is baffling to me and I really think that the only real change will come heart to heart person to person. And I hope that you know I hope that people will find a way to to help one another just to help one another. Thank you so much for being here for all of our readers. Thank you so much for the San Francisco Public Library. Thank you so much. The people who came just to listen. That's a huge thing. And I thank you for being audience. And I also thank the Romantish people on whose land we live. Thank you very much. John. Thanks everyone for coming. A special thanks to the poets and Kim shock for organizing this series. And we hope you will come back next month second Thursday of the month. Thank you also our friends and YouTube land for joining us. And we look forward to seeing you again. Take care.