 Hello and welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming to today's program, celebrating California's Poe Laot, Lee Herrick, and special guests. I'm John Smolley, a librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Center. You're at the main library on the third floor. While we're waiting for a couple more people to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about upcoming poetry programs this month. On behalf of the Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatush Sholoni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatush have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatush and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. Now, as you all know, April is the coolest month because it's National Poetry Month. And we're in the middle of a full month of poetry programs. I want to mention just a few of these here at the main library and a few online. This Wednesday, the library's African-American Center on the third floor will host a discussion of poet Audrey Laud's Lord's intersectionality as presented in her book, The Black Unicorn. Next Sunday, April 23, there'll be an online program featuring the poet Chen Chen in conversation with Sam Herschel-Wine. The two will discuss Chen's reach book. Your emergency contact has experienced an emergency. On Thursday, April 27, there'll be an online conversation on the shared aesthetics of innovative hybrid literature. This online program celebrates the release of Because I Love You, I Become War by Eileen R. Tavios. And Nature Felt but Never Apprehended by Angela Peñarredondo. And at the end of the month, Sunday, April 30, in this very room, San Francisco's current poet Lauret Tongo Eisenmarten will introduce his program, The West Revisits Harlem, in which black poets gather to be protagonists of a modern renaissance. Lastly, I want to mention a lovely book display commemorating recently deceased poets, poets who died in the last three years, located at the General Collections and Humanities Center on the third floor. Also on that floor, you'll find tens of thousands of books of poetry and 41 languages. So you can find out more about this by picking up a flyer at the back of the hall or one of our library newsletters. Or you can visit the events calendar online at our website at sfpl.org. So this ends my announcements about upcoming programs. I now want to turn the microphone over to the program's organizer, the poet Kim Shuck. Please give a warm welcome to Kim Shuck. There's a sign on top of this that says do not place anything on the keyboard. Which always makes me a little bit uneasy. Welcome to this event. This is sort of a labor of love for me. I'm really excited to have done this. You'll notice if you check it out that everybody reading today is not just a poet, but a poet organizer. And all but one have been laureates or are laureates somewhere. You can consider that for the one person who isn't a bit of a prediction. And it's not an immediate prediction necessarily. It's just a sincere hope. Our first reader, James Siegel, is, this requires a slight story, I'm afraid. I spent my childhood in sort of a triple point between the Castro, Noe Valley and the Mission. And I'm very possessive of the Castro because people write about it in some ways that are really romantic and not necessarily leaning into fact all the time. And when James's book came out, I took a deep breath, loosened my neck, and read it, and was blown away by exactly how right it was. When we talk about the people who died in the plague in the Castro, these people were like my uncles. And I loved them and knew them. And there were at least two years where I could have been in a funeral every weekend. And so I just will take this opportunity to again thank James for his incredible work on that. And I would have told you if I didn't like it because I like that. There are people laughing louder than others because they know me. Please welcome the incredibly insightful James Siegel to this microphone. He does the deep work. And he's the one I'm predicting will become a laureate at some point. How does that sound? Yeah, let's do this then. Let's speak a little more. Yeah, I don't. Is this on? Oh, yeah, that's working all right. OK, thank you so much, Kim. That actually really took me by surprise too. Kind of have to gather my thoughts again now. But thank you so much. Thank you to the library for having me here. Thank you, Kim, for inviting us here. And happy National Poetry Month. And thank you for coming out. It's really give yourself a round of applause for being here. We need an audience. So thank you so much for being here. I'm just going to dive right in. And before I get to some poems from the book, I want to read some new-ish kind of thing. So I didn't do a whole lot of writing during lockdown, but this is one thing that kind of came out of it. So this is called Wild Animals. We have lost so much. But in Istanbul, the dolphins are braving the Bosphorus. From the coast, you can see them surfacing where the freighters once cut their paths through the waves. And in Thailand, the endangered dugongs are returning, rarely seen by human eyes. Their girthy hides glide along the channels, grazing on seagrass, no fishnets to fear. Even here in San Francisco, we've lost the trolley car rumble of Market Street. But last week, a coyote was spotted, walking like an exonerated man. In the shadows of the vacant buildings, a rat in his mouth, a spring in his step, he owned the empty Embarcadero, and I am falling in love with his kind. Falling in love with the casmary goats, breeding until they have formed an army, then invading the streets of southern Wales, devouring hedges and flower beds. Let their kind take over and multiply, like the flamingos in Albania, the lagoons overflowing with pink wings, pelicans and herons, creatures of flight, unapologetic in their return, feathering the beaches we've left behind. Even the hummingbirds in my backyard have descended on the angels' trumpets, the branches bustling with their vibrations, they have decreed the end of winter. The long-lost honeybees reborn again, drunk on snap-dragons, the absence of man. And when day fades, four legged invaders, families of raccoons, scale the garden walls. You can hear them digging up the rock paths, overturning the outdoor furniture, but who could bear to stop them when they splash in the pond like children out past curfew? The night alive with nocturnal creatures, refusing to mourn what we have misplaced. Everything we're searching for is out there, where the coyotes gather on the streets of North Beach and howl at the midnight sky, singing out songs for a world that has died. I am desperate to sing along, to touch the feral animal tethered inside. Thank you so much. So the next poem I'm gonna read is from my book, The God of San Francisco. And yeah, I just felt I needed to read this one. It's kind of my ode to drag queens. And we lost a very important drag queen recently. And yeah, and then it's all sort of, we're all under attack again for some reason. So this is my, yeah, my ode to to all the wonderful drag queens out there, especially in San Francisco. It's called Stars. In San Francisco, you cannot see the stars. The planets wrap themselves in night fog. So I go searching for other forms of light. The marquee of the Castro Theater, an exclamation point punctuating the sky. And the people passing by shimmer and shine, queens in their rhinestone gowns, footfall, lightning and thunder and a size 12 pump. I am a lost sailor and they are the seven sisters, the Pleiades descending from the darkness, a chandelier earring sparkling in lamp glow. They captain their own ship and I follow their navigation to the midnight sun, the Moby Dick bar, where they obtain a gravitational pole. The room shifts as eyes turn to gaze on this mythology, this astronomical event in a thigh high boot, wigs teased to reach the troposphere. No one can resist this orbit. Men become satellites leaning in to light a cigarette to carry their bags because we are all small creatures seeking a fraction of this light, this duality in fish nets, a blood red lip. Even I cannot escape the magnetic drag that lures me across the bar to ask, may I buy you a drink? Yes, vodka, a splash of cranberry. It is an offering to the heavens, to Libra. The great scales and perfect balance the male, the female shurning away within us all. It is an offering to the day when I too will glow, a nebula, a cloud of dust moving along the sidewalk, unashamed. But tonight I gaze on the disco ball, its brilliant luminescence spinning on the surface of my martini, Andromeda floating on gin and vermouth. Thank you guys. And this is the, I'm gonna read the title upon from my book, The God of San Francisco. And I've been living in San Francisco now for over 18 years, which is crazy. And when I moved here, I thought I kind of knew everything, but I didn't really know anything at all. So this is called The God of San Francisco. Some believe the God of San Francisco has taken his throne at the top of Twin Peaks. A mighty Mount Olympus 900 feet above the city where the kingdom of heaven meets the kingdom of the bay. At that elevation, it is difficult not to see that something greater guides the way. Watches over all creatures and creation coming and going by bridge and by air, by cable car and ferry. Watch as the west erupts with light, the sun that drops into the Pacific, burning brighter than an angel entering the atmosphere. Watch the fog that follows floats like the Holy Ghost down the rocky hillsides to hangover Hays Valley, the hate Ashbury, the sweet incense of some Catholic mass. Yes, it is difficult not to believe, but they are correct in name and name alone because my savior has a bar stool at the Twin Peaks Tavern, a window seat to watch the world where Market Street meets Castro and the rainbow flags flap in the cold of another west coast wind. I go there when I need religion at a happy hour price, a Bud Light baptism, when I need a good lesson that God has yet to leave us behind. He sits alone, his hands turn to vein and bone, but by him a martini, vodka with two olives extra dirty and he will tell you anything you need to know. From the gold rush to North Beach where the sailors wore dresses over their anchor tattoos to Jose Saria and the black cat, the nightingale of Montgomery Street. Yes, those were the days when the prophets wore pearls, when the Bible was burlesque and the saints mingled with the sinners, the night a lightning strike of Arias and police sirens. God save us Nelly Queens. He raises a glass to the Nevermore, the 21st Street baths, the elephant walk to Harvey and his bullhorn, a drink to the things that slipped away to bullets that shattered brains, the murder called manslaughter. Ushering in those white night riots, the shattered glass of city hall cop cars turned to funeral pyres and he remembers death. Coming like it did in Egypt, stealing the firstborn, the secondborn, any young man who fell in love with a twilight over Polk Street, the obituary pages doubling every day with the black and white faces of the men who colored the Castro. He can tell you how he washed the feet of skinny boys with lesions, boys in hospice beds wheeled to the window for one final look of the city at dawn, then wheeled to the morgues with no family to claim their remains. So he took them, all of them, ashes upon ashes collected and released where the ocean waters worshiped the glory of the Golden Gate. He scattered them in south of market bars where the men in leather tap a keg toast the life of another dead brother. And he set them free where the winds bow and bend genuflect for the San Francisco sky, all the bodies that danced in fulsome neon and freedom day parades and disco light and speakeasy darkness in the soft ballet of love and life they flutter and float forever where the oceans wear a halo from the moon and the towers of twin peaks glow in the resurrection of the night. Thank you. All right, I'm gonna finish up with one more short poem. It's a, it's a, another new one and thank you guys so much for coming out. This is called call and response. From my bed, I can hear the neighbor's dog howling. Left alone, her owner's gone for the evening, the quiet night, too quiet, too lonely. So she fills the emptiness with the echoes of her voice, a deep-throated growl that ends with an upper octave wine. The same note played again and again as though she was practicing scales in that strange space of waking and submitting to slumber. I can't help but feel the frequency of loneliness. The unanswered call and response, the urgency to be heard, acknowledged. And from the warm blankets and his kennel, my dog intercepts the transmission, answers back with a lethargic grunt, a sleepy declarative bark. They take turns, one chorus after another, two baritones conversing in a nighttime language, a duet that becomes a trio. When I add my own voice, hush now, go to sleep. Everything is okay. Thank you so much. We get to know each other. We get to know each other through poetry sometimes and you know, there are people that you sort of not add at the readings and then there are the people that you bring home and let's sleep in your house. Linda Noel is one of my best friends now but we met through poetry. She's the former poet laureate of Hikaya and she's, you know, come the apocalypse. This is somebody I want on my team against the bad guys. Linda Noel. I'm gonna go from here because I scramble around with my papers. So good to be here. So thankful for Kim for all she does. And actually very honored to be here on the bill with everybody. Old man fire. Old man fire, old man fire, old man fire. We revere, respect and need you given by world maker and coyote the glow on the tip of his tail, tip of his ears. You can set us free and you can devour us. Both warm and cold slayer. Beauty is deceptive, you warp and dirty. The sky sully us. Your face aglow until distorted by growth fed by wind. You sing both a song of grandness and destruction. O flame, how you turn any beauty into ash. Linger in black, like us you need air to survive. Must be fed. Your life like ours is not eternal. O fire, old man, old man fire, flaming fire, fire, flaming. Essential to life. You can and do take it away. O flame within the womb, fire moon. Black bones on the ridgeline, skeletal limb, crotch and trunk. Black downslope stubble, scar shadow. Old man fire, who warms my home, who took my sister. Old man fire that burned our village. The circle inside our ceremonial house. heaving monster, chasing, whirling, devouring, roaring. Fateful wind and spin, skirt of every color flapping. Black boot, old man fire, we are not enemies. You take precious, sometimes everything, so we must combat you to survive even after you depart. Landscape of someone's life stripped. Meadow of charcoal, ash afterward. Broken glass and bent metal. Gems in gray dust, shiny black pill could take a lifetime to swallow. O fire, O flame, O ash, O black. Cinder block smeared on skin and were grateful for blue sky. We had a heck of a time with fires up north. The reading was a benefit. Make your checks payable to Squaw Valley Writers Conference. And like mushrooms break through damp but tough earth after rain, the poem arcs, the circle in motion, words fall out of pacific fog as the woman behind me repeats each word precisely while her husband pens the check, the donation to scholarship. And as his signature dries, she asks, do you know what a squat is? Halting the rocking motion of my feet. I don't know why they keep using that name. It's terrible, she says. My rocking commences as her words roll down my back with the fog, how poetry raises its head where words fall out of the mouth of fate. My thanks are prayers. And I cannot cry for poetry or for history in the foglight waiting for a poetry reading on the Barbary Coast because tears might flood the bay. I get heckled because of that poem because I always ask people to please not use the word squaw. And I was yelled from the back of the room one time, well, what do you want us to call them? And I said, how about native women? And that happened in this city. You were there, were you not? Yes. Okay, I know it's, I know it's spring, but like I said, we had a heck of a winter up north in Mendocino County. And for about two weeks, it seemed like every night it snowed, which was unusual and I grew up there. So anyway, I want to read this poem, Northern Women. The Northern Winter Woman is the wet and moody one. Her legs embrace naked heart timber. She is the woman who pushes fog inland. Moist brown woman, bent willow woman. The wood chopping woman. The wet winter woman struggles against wind bending her back. She is the white water woman who lingers with every storm. Snow-faced woman, wading salmon woman, the fire building woman. She is the earth sucking water back into her womb. The woman who has herself become night, whose pulse is the stirring motion of flowing water where wet women awaken in black forests. I have a friend up in Mendocino County, a sister poet Teresa Whitehill. And we were involved in the Haiku Festival because Ukaia spelled backward as haiku. And so I said, well, these don't adhere. I don't know if they're haiku. And she goes, well, if they're not haiku, maybe they're loku. So I'm going with that. How long can someone hold on to a shadow? Who in this life is shadowless? I'll name shadow soft, so easier to swallow. Cloud shadows on blue lake, black waves. Shadow eyes lurking, your heart running. Stone shadows in the throat choke. I'll lay beneath the shadow of your lips. Who walks in shadow with star mirrors? Dry grass stalks, shadows in night black. Inked shadow, love stain, silence. Ivory shadow, moon wink, shadow on my eye of you. Curve of your jawbone, half-shadowed. Sleep with me in the moist shadows. Hold my heart to the sun. How long can someone hold on to shadows? Do you count your shadows or allow others to? I wrote that a long, long time ago. I was sitting on the computer and the TV was on over here and it was the day that the blonde lady, had departed this world and so it was blasting on TV. Well, I was writing that, but it had nothing to do with that. I wanna read this poem and I called it Native Plant ID. And you know, when you're writing, sometimes you don't know what's gonna happen or where it's gonna take you. And there's always this effort in the last 20 and current years to identify native plants and rejuvenate them, because many were pushed away with non-native plants. And it's always a good effort. But when I was writing this, I was not thinking of that at all. I was thinking about plants and how I identify with them and how they're a part of many native people's lives. But we don't go, oh, I really identify with the native plants. But then when I came up with the title, I was like, okay, that's cool because it can play both ways and isn't that what poetry's about. So we'll see. Native Plant ID. Mushroom, pulp and gill, firm, flesh, food we share with thousand-legged worm and deer in whose flesh we taste. Pepperwood, holy medicine burned in the home of the newly departed, strength on strength, spirit on spirit to soften the grief. Elderberry, flute song and clacker, calling the rhythm of ancient dance, sweet on our tongues. Gooseberry, prickly globe of sunlight, gently rolled on a stone so we can savor your insides of nectar and seed. Willow, essential for survival, split, bent and woven into circles, tight enough to hold water. Wormwood, healer, swaying and spring wind to heal, strong enough to heal and harm honored scent in our home. Pine nut, moisture in my mouth, strung with shell and bone around the neck of sacred dance. Cedar, your smoke and strength meet and dissolve shadowed spirits. Your planks shelter us. I burn you each morning before leaving my home. Angelica, carried in my bosom, close to heart and blood. Healer, eaten to strengthen the circle. Buttercups, small suns on swaying thin stalks. My mother's favorite, I will forever see her face on your petals. Dogbane, we crack and pull out your innards, roll and twist them into twine to hold our world together. Mushroom, revisited. Creation does not allow for you to remain underground. You are destined to find light. A journey beginning long before rain. We wait with you as you become firm and earth softens in subtle motion. You emerge to become food. We gather, leaving your original seed to feed tomorrow. Thank you. Honestly, it's just family here today. Our next poet, I stood on this stage and accepted my laureate ship and Tonga was standing at the back and I made a prediction that he was probably gonna be, I would eventually sit in an audience and listen to him give a similar speech and I was not wrong except that it had to be on Zoom because of the pandemic. I fully expect to wind up a tricky trivia question about his early career. Please welcome to the stage, Tonga Weisenmart. I had this dream planted dead in a weekday that I was laid up in the hospital. And people kept coming into my room by the dozens and each dozen had special handshakes for each other and occasionally current dance moves and they would kick my hospital bed from time to time to let me know that they would be dancing from this room on out to my grave. Strange chow chows and soft shoe shuffles, disco spins like they were dancing for a white sundial marking numbness in their feet, drum, race ride and I was ready to die because, you know, they asked the musician in the tunes after court is to surround is themselves that is the uniform but still, I just couldn't bring myself to visualize against God. One of them stood over me like a conductor, waving their arms over my body, directing my heart to beat fainter and fainter, directing the tubes to turn the fluids back. I kept fading from consciousness. Thud after thud on the legs of my bed as they danced. Wilder and wilder, wild but meek or artificially meek like an artificial pastor told them to be always be some kind of projection or character to be laid at their feet. You're the only one participating in the revolution today. They mocked and I was ready to go because I had plenty of pianos that could use a new solo. I'm gonna be in the revolution for as long as it takes. So you can punch me out now. I mean, I was born with one foot in the line pit anyway, but check it out. No one bothered to ask the doctor if I was really dead. It's just too busy strutting, too busy kissing and I just kept fading and fading with only enough breath and sweet consciousness to count their smiles. One, two, three, four, five. And then I heard a voice, a whisper and it was counting with me. Six we said, seven we said, eight. Then another voice joined us, nine, 10 and another. You see, I haven't been eating, mama. I've been in the trance, I haven't been sleeping. I've been washing my face off the port of Charleston. There's blood on the floor. I go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of my enemies. A cold-balled-toothed man pitches pennies at my mug, shot negative all over the United States. There are toddlers in the rock. I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket and why blood agreements mean a lot and why I get shot back at. I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway. White skin tattooed on my right forearm ricochet sewage near where I collapsed into a rat-infested manhood. My new existence is living graffiti in the kitchen with a lot of gun cylinders to hack up House of God in part, no cops in part, my body brings down to Christmas. The new bullets pray over blankets made from the old bullets, pray over the 28,000 next beauty mark, extra-judicial Confederate statue restoration, the waistband before the next protest post. Hey, by the way, time is not an illusion, Your Honor. I will save your desk for last. You're with it, Your Honor. You're moving money again, Your Honor. That's only right in one thing. Nine white cops and prison guard shadows reminded me of spoiled milk floating on the oil spill. A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over is demise a new lake for a Black Panther party. Malcolm X's ballroom jacket slung over my son's shoulder to figment of village and new news to a new white preacher, all in an abstract painting of a president. Boss slavery's sometimes in it. The tantrum screeches of military boats in election Tuesday cars, a cold-blooded study in leg arms, proof that some white people have actually found a nuisance. Their sundown couples made their vows of love of an opaque piece of plastic in both action audiences. The mad guy of his second is definitely my favorite law of science. Founded news clippings and primitive methodists, my arm changes in imperialism. Simple policing versus structural frenzies. Elementary school script versus even wider white spectrums. Artless bleeding in a challenge of watching civilians think. Terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy. I'm gonna go ahead and sharpen these kids' heads in the air as myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests. Modern fans of war. What we're up with there? T-shirt palms and T-shirt guilt. And me having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus, I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life. You know, a tour guide through your robbery, I also am. Cigarettes saying, look what I did about your silence. Ransom Water and Botspring Gold, this decade is only for accent grooming, I guess. Ransom Water and Botspring Gold, the corner store must die. War games, I guess all these tongues rummage jump. You know, the start of mass destruction begins and ends in restaurant bathrooms and some people use and other people clean. Now, you telling me it's a rag in the sky? Waiting for you, yes. We've written the same, we set the stage, we should have fit in. You know, warehouse jobs are for communists, but now more corridor and hallway have walked into our lives. Now the whistling is less playful and the vibe wire overcrowded too, my dear. If it is not a city, it is a prison. If it has a prison, it is a prison, not a city. When a courtyard talks on behalf of military issue, all walks take place outside of the body. Dear life to your left, the medieval painting to your right. None of this really makes an impression. Crop people living in thin air. You have five minutes to learn how to see through this breeze. When the mass goes sideways, barbed wire becomes the floor, barbed wire becomes the roof, 40 feet to the sky becomes out of bounds. When the mass breaks in half, mind was weighed, eyes go, you know they killed the world for the second giving everyone the same backstory. We watching Gary Indiana fight itself into the sky, old pennies for wind. For that wind fund you give before the hood goes up and over your headache. Pennies that stick together mocking all aspirations. I mean, stuck together pennies was the first newspaper I ever read along with the storefront dwelling army that always lets us down. Where the Holy Spirit favors the back room, souls in a situation to offer 100 ways to remain the loser. Souls watching the clock, hoping their eyes don't lie to sad people. What's we talking about again? The narrator asked the graveyard, man 10 minutes flat, said the graveyard, the funeral only took 10 minutes, man never tell that to anyone again. You just gonna pin the 90s on me, all 30 years of them, then why should I know the difference between sleep and satire? The pyramid of corner stores fell on our heads, we died right away. That building wants to climb up and jump off another building. These are downtown decisions. Somewhere on this planet, it's August 7th and we running down the breast, thinking one more needs to come with me. I mean, what evaporated on earth so that we could be sent back down? First, I should have apologized to the souls of the house because I'm wearing the cheekbones of the mask only. Like a pill bottle whose name is yours, named tagged on the side of a factory of wrists, I mean teeth of the mask now, back of the head of the mask now, a new phase of anti-anthropomorphism, fending for real faces, stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family. I'm not creative, just the silliest of the revolutionaries, my blood drawn on my only jacket, the police state psychic middleman, evangelizing for the creation of an unmasked, an unmet girl, blood of a lamb, less racialized or awesome prison sentence, right angle made between a point on a Louisiana plantation and a five-year-old's rubber ball three feet high and falling like a deportee plane to complete my interpretation of garden variety genocide. I am small talk about loving your enemies a little more realistically about. Paper Tigers and all so good, I mean, I need my left hand back, broke my neck on a piano key, found paradise in the fist fight, maybe I should check into the Cuba line, watching the universe last metronome, some called black Jacobins, they just wait. These religions will start resigning in a decade or two, some color fleece, some transactionally in the cotton gothic society, class betrayal gone glassless, I mean, ironically, my window started fogging over too, as I was trying to figure out which Haiti would get me through the winter, which poem houses souls, which socialist breakthroughs, breakthroughs like taking 10 steps back and finally trying stillness like introducing Gabriel Proser to Thelonious Muck. I mean, I remember childhood, remember the word childhood being a beginning, scribbling on an amazing grace, I rented this body from some circumference of slavery, remember being kicked out the Midwest, strange food theater, lit them in circuses like mine in stomachs, the ruling class blessing their blank checks with levy phone with opioid tea, sentient dollar bills yelling to each other, pocket to pocket, cello stands in the precinct for a company counter-revolutionaries, my mother raised me with a simple pain, the poet loses his mind, like the room has weather, a first girlfriend gravity, difference between me and you, the madness wants me forever, a pair of apartments defining both my family and political composure, books behind my back, bail money paved into the streets playing, euphoria, euphoria, cliche, bracing for the medicines, recall sharing a dirty deli sounds with my friends, blackjackabins underground, topography of a grandmother's hands, psychology of the mask now, teeth of the mask again. The other organizers will recognize the concept of a slow stage, this is a slow stage. Our next reader, sorry, our next reader is a deli on Thinga, who is the current poet laureate of Oakland and is also the inaugural poet laureate of Oakland. We have not spent nearly enough time together. I love this woman's writing and it is my aspiration to create a situation where the Venn diagram that is where we overlap gets bigger. Come on up. I was supposed to say she's gonna be at all of them later. It's just, all right, Mama Connie's point. Mama Connie is my great-grandmother and so we always greet the elders in the room. Whether or not you can see them, scent in a room can pull me back through time. Sometimes it's a song, truth is, I can be interrupted in the middle of a thought. The ancestors call clearer than a phone line ringing. They want to talk through me. They wanna say something, they need a tongue. I give them mine. Today, they want you to know there is nothing new. There have always been stars. We are cosmic dust, fragments of all that has ever been. There is nothing new. Only those who have forgotten, those who think this is all. Now is not all, here is not all. They want us to know that there is nothing new, nothing unthought, only unknown in the now. They want us to remember, to remember. They say it's important. There are things that get lost. The sound of someone's laughter, a gift from on high, forgotten, floating somewhere, waiting to be remembered. The sweat of a brow furrowed in concentration falling into the dirt to become a part of the all carried in the wind, the rain down again absorbed forever waiting for its moment to be recalled. The curve of a muscle strained in burden, holding, lifting, making the now. I stand in honoring that toll, that honest labor, often free, unrewarded, but earnest. There are stories of quiet Saturday mornings in the back seats of cars. No money but going somewhere, looking, seeing, longing for some future time. Not knowing those precious moments would disappear under the weight of those future days, long and empty of the things that roll softly before them or were drug down long, dark hallways, some lost on purpose, others waiting for thought to brush up against them. Things like the sound of your dead great grandmother's name, gasping for air, waiting for you to say it aloud. They want us to know that we are their future. Yes, the dead have futures. We live them. They want us to know that they left work for us. They want us to remember what they tried but could not do. All that was dreamed, they want us to do it. They want us to know that we are a promise that they dream on. Yes, the dead have dreams. We are their dreams. Our rising, our falling, our pain, our joy. They want us to know. They told me to write it down and to say it aloud. I wrote it down. I'm saying it aloud. Something is always dying, just not in the middle of the room. They were roses before they were mulch. Five pennies in a drawer. A beggar's feast is better than an empty basket. All stories start with the potential of happy endings. I have walked for miles in the eye of the storm blinded by the sun I sought. For seven miles I was a full moon with five pennies in my pocket. Life is a dream that ends upon waking. Roses and illusions die. Centuries under water, sleeping, phantoms deep, the bones in eye. Sometimes death saves you for life. Roses floating on water. Five pennies in a drawer. Now that's the smell of hope, she said, but never quite understood that metaphors dressed the truth for dinner, a meal of ghost walking on the water, mostly bone, but some have eyes floating across the graveyard, North Star Eye's dream of locomotion. Transplanted trees grow in the direction of home. My MLK walk resurrected itself on a milk carton in Harlem. Became black berets, leather coats and guns. Locomotion became movement. They were roses before they were mulch. Something is always dying. Minutes, murder hours, every sunrise, light cuts dark rage and bullets next to the hope in the drawer. Bones on the water, bleeding lions onto the streets in the flow of lost religions, dangerously feeding the lumpen. Baraka said, every man should see himself when thinking of God. Spotlights and sunsets, I buried my five pennies in the back of my mind next to the chatty dead people. I wanted to be a river, but the ocean branded me. One hand a spear, the other a shield, neither tool favored. The dead won't shut up, they got them pennies. They rattle them like dice. Something is always dying. Just not in the middle of the room. The wind won't leave me alone. Got me watching fig trees and praying the grapevines. Crows and doves watch over me knowing I too want roots. That dream drowns a thousand times a day. Sharks and itinerant poets, prophets writing dirty, God's trombones, Joshua wrote in the Jericho with the confidence of Hannibal. I got an eighth of some good grain, gin for Ogum. I favor brown liquor, drums and gods of thunder. I talk to the dead, we got pennies for eyes. They rattle like dice as we float across the graveyard. Rootless, ruthlessly defying the storm, riding on the wind, rage and bullets in an open jaw. Ink, writer's blood, indigo sorcery, singing blues and exaltation without sound, painted on a page, toneless, pickle thought, snapshot, no evolution, verbatim, tied, no room for growth, well, perhaps in reinterpretation but how it's been fixed, it's tied to a page. Like the tangled hearts underneath the spray can, clown tatted on a graffiti artist, ink shall not be moved, removable only with abrasive scrubbing on skin, not penciled in, not erasable, permanently marked, inked, set as if in cement, unmovable, meant to last centuries, sympathized Delos liminal landmarks of a shifting geography. Nothing means what it meant yesterday. Language melts, reassembles in a different language wearing a different dress and goes to market on a different day. Ink is a trick used to tie lives together until they weigh as much as truth. Ink runs in water, can't change its mind, can be reproduced without a sound, was meant to be fireworks and tongue in the bombs. Ink has often been used as a tool by the devil. Stealing sound, like Kodak, stole the souls of Geronimo and Sitting Bull, sat them airless unmoving, safely on a page. They who ran with the wind run Nomo. Nomo is the wind's return. Are you tired drum to a page? Ink ain't got no heartbeat. Nomo is the wind, creation, destruction, life force crossing the continent of the mouth, pushing past the borders of the lips. Spit is free, liquid mercury. Can be made to serve circles or disassemble them. Spit, nimbler than ink can reinvent itself in a raised eyebrow, sit in the shade of a tongue, can pitch tent, offering one song telling many stories. Far above empty, white pages spit, don't always dress for the occasion, arrives uninvited, sometimes full of spirits, is hoarse from testimony, is swerve, language is its own army. Now spit has lost the land that its library stood upon but it memorized the words of books too sacred to write. Ink never had the keys to the temple. It always told a story after. Unless of course it was written on the face of a virgin bride, then it might tell dreams that signify, maybe. But you gotta be sleep to dream. Spit is awake. Ink stole jazz from cold train. Stole the sound of dance from delicate, dusty dances. No one wrote about them. Just danced their stories without remembering the calluses on their feet. Ink ain't free. It cost a lot to color improvisation in amateur colors. Well, five-year-olds massacre hundred-year-old music trapped on a page, not meaning what it meant when it was written. Now, Ink say a lot. Some of it ain't true. Some sound fine. Sound like who they wanna be when their mama looking. Not the way they treated my mama, not the way they treat me, nor the way they gonna treat my kids or my kids. They leave that part out. They don't write the color of that down. They keep it parted in with the notes, though not like babies in bathwater. Ink has been known to be scandalous. Ink huts rabbits with a cannon. Well, you best watch out for a rabbit packing heat armed with a quick tongue and their own history twisted in DNA and ask yourself how you burn that. If spit remembers to remember how you shoot the nose off that. If spit sees stars, you need to invent a telescope to find. What else it know that you don't know? Listen. And maybe you can write it down. Ink is good for that. But it don't swear to tell the truth. It's hard to look in the eye and it don't always signify what it meant when it was written. It don't signify. What if Ink leave you out? Do you still exist? What if Ink say you is what you ain't? Then is you? What if Ink flip the whole page leaving you only the margin? You got enough room to write? What if they left parts of you floating in the ocean? What if you left parts of yourself behind discarded out of survival's necessity? Do you write that tale? If you ain't got a language anymore, how you write? If they take your word as soon as you say them, twist, spin and mix them, ring profit from your profits, how you or the story of you survive? Well, maybe you invest some new words, spit in freed styles, win conjures, never inked, two bowl razor words, meaning changing before they can write it down. How you like me now? You think you win the conversation you think? Well, it don't signify. Like blue, black, wrinkled old men in stingy brims, teeth clenching, five dollars to God's, breath smelling the gin and knowing from a distance whose eyes grin as they eloquently explode, divine curses like quarks from age to wine. And you gotta shake your head so it don't hit you as it moves through the room, shouting like a big buck woman, everybody looking. Now, how you write that down? Now, when spirit rise up round midnight, it can only be appeased by breath, breaking past cracked lips like wind over sharp mountains, ink can't signify, it can only chase the wind, no more is the wind, catching the hymns of old ladies on Sunday mornings. Now, how you write that down? How you write crossing the desert called an ocean, cosmically homeless, transatlantic transgression, pressed like powder, exploring purple super beams of product of projects overflowing with product, everybody swinging and ain't nobody got time to duck, but we still here, how do you write that down? There are not a whole lot of people that I have hard time reading after. That's one of them. So I'm not gonna, I'm gonna introduce our poet Laureate from the state of California. We sure waited long enough for you, huh? There was a break and the string of Laureates there for a little bit and it's necessary for this state of all states. I'm sure all states feel that way, but I sure feel that way. Lee Herrick and I have been corresponding for some time. This is, I think, the first time we've ever done this face to face. We've seen each other in thumb print, internet communications periodically, but I'm just delighted. I love his work. It's quite easy sometimes to forget that the people who do the organizing are also really good writers. That was sort of part of this exercise today. Anyway, you don't wanna continue to hear me. Lee Herrick, come on up to this microphone. Yeah, okay. I could listen to that all day. Those were incredible. I'm grateful to be here, honored to read with everybody. And Kim, thank you so much for having me. I was telling her earlier, so I might as well say it here. Admired you and your work and your spirit from afar for a long time, so it's good to be here. And thank you for bringing us together. So I was appointed about four months ago now and that was after about a seven or eight month period where I just didn't think much of it. Coming from a state like this with poets like this, you don't think something like that. And I wasn't really, you know? I think our next one might be in this room too. And I kind of forgot about it. And then I got a call and I knew I was being advanced and had a really kind of intense but wonderful interview with about six people from the governor's staff. And it's been a whirlwind ever since. This is an incredible place. I know you all know that, but it's been a joy to see that in full color. So I'm gonna read, actually before I read, I wanna say that the program or the project that I'm starting hopefully will be on the California Arts Council website by June 1st. We're shooting for and it's called Our California and we hope to get poems from all Californians who would like to send in a poem, any age, any experience level, documented or not, free or not. I've been doing some talks and readings invited to state prisons. Those are Californians too. So anybody who would like to send in a poem, we hope to get those and we'll be posting them all on the California Arts Council website. A poem about your city or your town or your state as you see it, what you love about it, what joy you find in it and what you change about it, what you don't love about it. This was a poem I wrote thinking about California as I saw it, things I'd seen and hoped for and imagined. My California, here an olive votive keeps the sunset lit. The Korean 20-somethings talk about hyphens, graduate school and good pot. And a group of four at a window table in Carpenteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi. Here in my California, the streets remember the Chicano poet whose songs still bank off Fresno's beer-soaked gutters and almond trees in partial blossom. Here in my California, we fish out long noodles from the fa with such accuracy you'd know we'd done this before. In Fresno, the bullets tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day. In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace. In my California, you can watch the sun go down like in your California. On the ledge of the pregnant 22nd century, the one with a bounty of peaches and grapes, red onions and the good salsa, wine and Japchae. Here in my California, paperbacks are free. Farmers markets are 24 hours a day and always packed. The trees and water have no nails in them. The priests eat well, the homeless eat well. Here in my California, everywhere is Chinatown, everywhere is K-town, everywhere is Armenia town, everywhere a little Italy, less Confederacy, no internment in the valley, better history texts for the juniors in my California, free sounds and free touch, free questions, free answers, free songs from parents and poets, those hopeful bodies of light. So, all right, thank you. I wasn't planning to read this, but I'm just gonna read this short poem. So, during 2020, God, and thank goodness we're past 2020, right, but I was contacted by Penn Norway who are working to free Turkey's longest-serving political prisoner, Ilhan Komak, and he was jailed at age 22 for lighting a fire and then charged with being a part of a political workers' party. And so we were invited to write him a poem. He's also an amazing poet. He's got, I think, seven or eight books. He's just brilliant, and he's been in prison now in Turkey for about almost 30 years now. And then he wrote us a poem back. And there are political prisoners all across the world, of course, including the United States. But I'm gonna read this poem. It's sort of a simple poem I wrote to him. And part of my entry into this poem is reading some interviews with him, and he said he hadn't seen a horse in 15 years. In a daydream for Ilhan, say there is a field. In it, a horse. You have not seen one in over 15 years, I read, it is indigenous to your country much like you're dreaming. A wilderness no state can own where the horse, like the dream, can take flight and land on a cloud. Ilhan, here's a true story separate from the horse or the daydream. I was born in South Korea and adopted to the United States. I was 10 months old. I don't know if I was lost, abandoned, given, or stolen, but now I write poems and know they kept me alive. What a blessing to place words near each other. Someday I hope we could share a walk in a field and see a horse. You would know more about them than I ever would. How they see, how they run, how their calm grace keeps us in light. Thank you, you don't have to clap. Now I'm all thrown off, but I'm inspired, so see where this goes. Well, might as well go further off script. I got this email during the pandemic. I don't know if it was the pandemic or just poetry doing its thing, but I got an email from this woman in France who asked me permission to use a line from one of my poems for a tattoo she was getting. E-poets know this, so you get interesting requests, right, Tonga? And so I think I'll read that. Oh, it's just a short poem called The Impossible Replication of Desire. The Impossible Replication of Desire. How much delight before we collapse? How much earth in the lungs? How much wine? When we want more, when the weeds sprawl, it is not what you think. Think how fast some landscapes change. The lover, the gardener's grand idea, the failing maple, the boat about to capsize, the correction, the hands reflection, the impossible replication of weight versus time, how it will never mean what you want. All right. So I'm gonna get a few more. I think I'll read this poem. So I was born in Korea. Don't know exactly when I was born, but I know it was late 1970. Never met my birth mother or first mother, as we call them, or birth father or first father, never met them. But I wrote this poem thinking of her, and also it's probably one of countless number of ways women are stigmatized. And one I don't hear about a lot is women who place children for adoption. But I wrote the poem for her and also just with all adoptees in mind. So it's sort of a love song for her and for adoptees. How music stays in the body. Your body is a song called birth or first mother, a miracle that gave birth to another exquisite song. One song raises three boys with a white husband. One song fought an American war overseas. One song leapt from 14 stories high and like a dead bird shattered into the clouds. Most forgot the lyrics to their own bodies. I've been told mothers don't forget the body. So I decided to paint abstracts of mountains or moons in the shape of your face. I can't remember your face, the shape or story or how you held me the day I was born. So I wrote 1,000 poems to survive. I want to sing with you in an open field, a simple room or a quiet bar. I want to hear your opinions about angels. Truth is angels drink too. Soju spilled on the halo, white wings, sticky with gin as if any mother could forget the music that left her. You should hear how loudly I sing now. I've become a ballad of wild dreams and coping mechanisms. I can breathe now through any fire. I imagine I got this from him or you, my earthly inheritance, your arms, your sigh, your heavy song. I know all the lyrics. I know all the blood. I know why angels howl into the moonlight. All right, all right. So I'll just read a couple more. My wife is here, grateful for her. My daughter's here, grateful for her. They were of course in, I don't know why I'm talking about the lockdown. I hope this isn't too much of a downer. I'll try to bring it back up. But I was asked to write a poem about food and open space in like April 20. Do you remember April 2020? What the, you know, and so I'll read this one and then I'll finish I think with a new one. I was asked to write a poem about food and open spaces. And so I ended up writing a poem about food trucks and you know, those started way before L.A. It went out to the fields, you know, where people were working and they weren't allowed to leave so the food went out to them or other countries. They've had things like this of course for decades. But it was fun writing this poem. A.B. Sedarian loves song for street food with an, and this has an epigraph from Anthony Bourdain who said street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race. All praise for the Pazole glistening in midday light by the grace of the woman near the Komal. In Southern California, Raul Martinez unveiled a mobile downtown gold mine of Al Pastor by a bar in East L.A. for the drunks, the artists, the necessary future waiting in line. Praise be to the ice cream truck, glory of the van's slow roll. So praise the van, hut, cart, booth, tent, stall, stand, bike, or truck. I once devoured a Tlauda in Oaxaca City, broke down just as the sunlight burst through the heart of a woman, kissing her baby's forehead by the plaza. When I say love, what I mean to say is I dream of you through disaster, malady, drought, or that nightmare anxiety pandemic. But now, even in this late dying, let us praise the 20,000 open-hearted vendors in Bangkok and the glorious pupusas in San Salvador. I ate on a bench near a dove. Que Sadiah, Arapa, Tukpoki, Hallelujah. The bond me right on the outskirts of Hue, the chili pepper, the cilantro songs. Praise the Zocalo saints who brought me to tears with a taco so full of music, I almost wept. Under the Beijing moonlight, balsa is made by angels, vendors with wings if you know where to look. On West 53rd and 6th Avenue, New York City, Halal. Or in Fresno, no xenophobe is welcome. Tell me what to eat. Your Chuan, your Elote, your mouth full of pure zen, like savory, surprising flashes of heaven. All right, thank you. And I think I'll, I'm just gonna keep reading new ones. I was told by someone recently that people don't do cross words anymore or play word games, just made me sad. And I started thinking about all these things that are vanishing, and so I'm writing a lot of sonnets and I wrote a poem about just sounds that we don't hear anymore at the risk of total silence. I wanna ask, can you think of a sound that you just don't hear anymore? A person's voice or something that you don't hear anymore? Yeah, your language spoken, slowly disappearing or not hearing it as much. Anybody else think of anything you don't hear as much anymore? Birds, yeah. Milk bottles, yeah, a full quart of milk and a glass. Yeah, so this was my thinking of that. And interestingly, my birth mother appeared at the end of this poem too. So anyway, thanks again for having me and thank you, Kim. Partial crown in praise of absent sounds. I want the fax machine, the dot matrix buzz saw of news across the wire, the young woman's lisp and fire during solo moonlight road trips, the shuffle of predictable card tricks, the acoustic chord like sweet desire, the rotary dial and pronunciation error. When I say absent sounds, what I mean typewriter key as much as anio or yay, the eight track plunk as much as Korean vowels drawn out at the end like a plain blue sky. I want to know the way home. There's not much more I need, home. There's not much more I need except to know how much blue sky there is from here to you. Why I sometimes hear your voice freed, wild, true. Please take the lead. At times I thought I was going to die. At times fire, at other times firefly. My daughter was four at the art gallery and called it the art galaxy. A malapropism I wish existed, star, sonnet, serenade. I want the mispronunciation, broken rhythm and scratch record, survivor wisdom. A mother's prayer for her son who stayed perfectly still when she left and kissed him. Thank you. I have time and I'm just gonna share two. On Thursday, I wear sapphires and lithium. Bridges from Wednesday morning's song. We wake in the hour of grief. We wrap ourselves in overthink and the lost and heroic and the fragments of healing they might be. Pen tracks or unresolved cordings they might be. Promise shards or other dangerous poisons. Might be a house sparrow perching on the fern tree. Might be a moth atlas another unfamiliar navigation. On Thursday, the day to conjure deep luck, to conjure restoration, wrapped in warm in language of edges, sitting among lavender plants and other sorts of poems. And finally this. You thought you were going dark. I will take my paycheck in indigenous people who die of old age in bed. This applies they sent were body bags because we're measured in scars and trauma and creerable but no less deadly disease. Because we're measured in inmates, vanished, they couldn't afford school. Because we're measured in teeth, removed before our skulls are returned, stolen as they were from our graves, cracked by grinding and sleep in stress. Because the commodity can said fish but was full of tails and bones and there's no running water. Because in order to read a book about a city end in who isn't an addict, isn't beaten by a boyfriend, doesn't die in the first chapter, I had to write the damn thing my own self. The price of my work has changed. I know I've done good when I get that smile from Linda. Thank you all for being here. We're on a short leash because there's another event taking place in this space like now. So thank you for being here. Thank you James, Linda. Thank you, Tongo, Ayodele, Lee. Thank you all for being audience because we can't do it without audience and have a great rest of your day.