 I wait each night for a self. I say the mist. I say the strange tumble of leaves. I say a motor in the distance. But I mean a self, and a self, and a self. A small cold wind coils and uncoils in the corner of every room, a vagrant. In the dream, I gather my life in bundles and stand at the edge of a field of snow. It is a field I know but have never seen. It is nowhere and always new. What about the lives I might have lived? As who? And who will be accountable for this regret I see no way to avoid? A core or a husk, I need to learn not how to speak, but from where. Do you understand? I say name, but I mean a conduit from me to me. I mean a net. I mean an awning of stars. Massa confusa. A body was left me. I did not put it on. Two densities of bone. Two methods of eye. In the spleen, an oasis. An oasis as mirage. All my people burned on either side of me. This is called trying to speak. And I was recently told that I should offer it because the book is not light. And I was recently told that I should offer trigger warnings at readings. So the next two poems that I'm going to read deal in some way with domestic abuse and traumatic racial history. The latter more so in the second poem that I'll read, but anyway. So it's called trying to speak. Another time on their bed he called out holding a 38 against her neck slurring something about freedom. And she, repeating the Arabic name she'd given him salim, the kind, the undamaged, paled like flame, an empty cocoon separating, dispersing. From the hallway I watched him step down and walk out of the room running his hand through my hair as he crossed the threshold. Composed, turning to glance at the clock she closed her robe and asked me to take the chicken from the freezer. This is called plantation. When he finally brought the hammer down one half inch from my mother's face the hole in the wall, wide as a silver dollar. I was close enough, huddled there in the folds of her lap her arms wet with sweat and crossed against my back. And since from the room all sound had gone I was clear enough to see inside the cracked plaster a river delta fractured branching off and becoming the sea or a tiny moon on a shore of white sand the tide lapping and in foam and tugging. No, twelve dead presidents perched there each with the face of my father clipped, vacant eyed scanning the field for a body to mark then locking in on her knee bent dread ordinary, mammary a yellow suckling heavy on her tit. No, I think it was her one good eye refusing to blink scaling the bare white wall at the core of the mind not measuring its height then circling a waterless well in a desert without sand unnumbered sisters before her caught in the belly of the boats where there was too much sound to hear though only one voice, one cry their dark arms like trellis vines crossed and reaching. So I'm going to read the poem that was in the coffee bag which was such a nice project to be involved in so thank you again, Stu, for including me in that and to the folks at Nomadic for doing such an exciting project. We're in lit journals and that's where people find our poems so it's good to bring poems to folks who might not know to seek them out so thanks for that. Okay, this is called self-portrait in black and white if I said I did not want to live anymore would you understand that I meant like this the years form a mythology I can almost explain I see in colors because they are always so much a part of the problem a fire engine is a backpack and my father dollar bill is headscarf star and crescent candy cane is barbershop and my choice of men gray is skin the bridge in the center of your eye now, stirring milk into my coffee with a bent spoon I stir milk into my coffee with a bent spoon so I'm going to read a poem that I actually so there's some Caveconum family in the room and Caveconum is an amazing organization that's really changed my life in all ways and I'm going to read a poem that I wrote actually about my journey like my literal journey to Caveconum to the first retreat I think it was the summer of 2013 which was personally a huge transition for me and a confrontation of something you know, a kind of core essential aspect of myself that for a whole host of reasons had prior to that moment been unexplored so this poem is actually dedicated to all the attendees of the 2013 Caveconum retreat and it's called Passing which I was no longer willing to do at a station in a no-name town the blue-red coleus blooms from a cleft in the track too obvious, I say out loud to the window to God, to no one rolling my white eyes into my thick bright head if I arrive, who will greet me as brother who will greet me at all feeling from my veins the pull of our one long pulse pissing into the metal bin faced streaming out onto the track I laugh at the mirror an animal unhinging trying to see what they see in whatever I am standing here then the train slides into a long tunnel the lights flicker off and I am back inside my mother okay so I told you I had nothing light for you I mean I'm honest about it anyway so I will do I think like two or three more I think okay I'm gonna do a prose poem called Clean Slate and part of the, I mentioned earlier the instability of race I think part of the way that that's been expressed and part of the kind of historical explanation for that expressed within my family and the historical explanation for that is the intersection of blackness and Arabness and how within the Arab world there's really a disavowal of blackness and of Africanness and I'll probably be speaking longer than the poem the poem's quite short but it's necessary to contextualization in North Africa for folks who may not know identity is incredibly complex because there are actually two colonial histories in the North when we think about colonial a colonial history in North Africa we think about French occupation typically but the Arab presence in North Africa is itself a colonial history and what we actually have in North Africa are Arabized Africans who then centuries later were colonized by the French and so the psychic trauma really and the complexity around identity in the North is what results in even phenotypically very dark North Africans identifying with Europe you know not identifying with sub-Saharan Africa not identifying with blackness and so it's especially coming from the U.S. you know it's surreal so anyway so this is a prose poem called Clean Slate as a very young woman my mother drank a glass of bleach thinking in water not tasting the burn not smelling a single fume at the hospital after she had begun to breathe the color returned to her face the doctor warned one chemical will never exit your system it won't ever leave you though she has survived she does not know it yesterday on the phone I said I'm beginning to understand that I am African and she said now how can that be child how can that be and I'll just read one more from that vein since I talked so much about the historical context this is called the most opaque sands make for the clearest glass the dark matter turned its face to mine and I could feel its breathing the invisible pull between the invisible air and my half-lit face hungry and waiting I felt it reaching for me the sorrow down slip of its call its smoke tongue licking behind my ears my hair erect with kinesis I felt it settle on and around the table a slow turning a cold tail how can she sit there and say child I am not we are not in spite of no inside of the dark fact of her body and I'm in a close with something from the other thread of the book which explores queer identity and queer sexuality and this is a sequence called homosexuality and it's organized geographically so each section has its own geography and so I'll just name the place where we are and thank you so much again for being here and for inviting me to read these poems too homosexuality New York these days my sympathy narrows in the barracuda I sip a dirty martini my back against the bar in the half-lit glitz marionettes bloom from the ceiling the walls stringless they fumble into each other always about to fall Kazablanca my uncles find wives at the souk Kautar and Latifa were sisters now sisters in law at home preparing couscous they slip gin into their buttermilk their men at the window calling down their wives on bicycles Laramie Florence and are you here too, dear Brunetto if I had not in those days found you among the other poets in the ghetto would I now be here passing through this place guided by the elder to the skies above the sky how could I alone issue these words this music in our size give me your book, your exiled hands I will hold them as your unreadable eyes and walk with reverence on burning sands California this initiative measure is submitted to the people in accordance with the provisions of article two section eight of the state constitution this initiative measure expressly amends the state constitution by adding a section thereto Newark, New Jersey, Cyprus, Texas Greensburg, Indiana, Tehachapi, California Facebook asks what's on your mind jumping off the GW bridge sorry, no note no note, no note Zurich as though recklessly we burn the old parchment in unison cleansing the walls with their smoke as though our bodies themselves have magnetized like at night when I enter the room to join you in bed and you still asleep reach out for me thank you so much