 Hello and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to tonight's Poem Jam poetry reading. I'm John Smully, librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Center on the third floor where we have poetry in 41 languages. Tons of thousands of books, new and old, drop by and check it out sometime. While I think we may have a few more people arriving, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a couple of our upcoming programs. So on behalf of the Public Library, we want to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatushaloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards, 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 traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects to the Ramatushaloni ancestors, elders, and relatives, and wish to acknowledge their sovereign rights as first peoples. So I just want to mention that this Saturday, we're having a big book festival, the sixth Filipino American International Book Festival that will take place in multiple rooms in this very library. There'll be authors, book vendors, organizations, and a pre-recorded talk by the Nobel Prize-winning Maria Resa. And then this coming Tuesday, the library's online on the same page book club will be discussing the acclaimed memoir by Roberto Lovato, Unforgetting, a Memoir of Family Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas. Then next Saturday, the author will be here in person with Vanessa Huah, another author in the Soroyan Gallery on the sixth floor of the main library. So I hope you can come to either or both of those things so you can learn more about programs by picking up flyers from the table over there or our monthly newsletter, also on the table. There's also coffee and cookies, so please feel free to help yourself to that. So that ends my announcements about programs. Our usual host, Kim Shock, was not able to be here tonight, so she asked her good friend, the wonderful poet, Paul Corman-Robbins, to lead tonight's program. And so I'm going to turn the microphone over to Paul, and he will introduce the program and its readers. Please give a warm welcome to Paul Corman-Robbins. Thank you, John, and thank you to the San Francisco Public Library. Always an honor and a privilege to be here and to be reading on unseated Ohlone-Romatesh land. We have just a really good program, the theme for tonight that we was loosely based around the concept of hysteria, which means a lot of different things to a lot of folks, but particularly to an all women's lineup tonight that has a particular political resonance, I think, and we wanted to stir that pot a little bit, to say the least. Three fantastic readers, future poets tonight. Ilana Ayama, Alexandra Costulus, and Kellyanne Parker will be featuring this evening. And I'm gonna begin with Ilana Ayoyama, who I've got to meet through Genevieve who's right there just a few years ago. She began writing poetry in a high school class and continued at UC Santa Cruz after college. She worked more in memoir writing until years later when she joined the older Writers Lab. Her poem, Erad, is set in the berry was selected to be read by Jack Hirschman at the Poets 11 series. And her poem, Ladders, was selected by Kim Shuck, a couple of years ago for this very library's poem of the day exhibit that they put together during the pandemic. So there's some pretty good roots for Ilana going into this reading, which I know happens to be her first public reading as a poet. She is the author of the book. Let me get a copy. Notice the lines from Redwood Curtin Publications. Just released this year, a brand new book. It is her first full length collection of poems. And Ilana currently lives in San Francisco in Coville near her mother and daughter. And we are so, so pleased to have her reading some amazing works tonight. Be sure to support her and purchase copies of her book this evening. She's told me she will sign them for you. I think Kellyanne will sign books for you as well to this tonight. So please give a big, big hand for Ilana Ayama. 15 minutes of fame. I think we're supposed to be 10, but I'm gonna, we'll see, 15 or 10. Thanks so much for everything. I just wanna thank Paul and Genevieve. Genevieve got me started and we used to work every week and we had so much fun at Frickin' Chicken. And I learned a lot from her. And then I started working with Paul when I started making a book and poetry therapy, I would call it. And also just, yeah, he just really gave me a lot of confidence. And I'm just really thankful that this is done. And time to work on book two. So my first poem, I was supposed to ask her beforehand. My mom, who's here, if I could read a short poem. This is one that Genevieve helped me with. And hopefully, yeah, it'll be okay to read about my mom in front of her. Okay, it's called Mother's Day Poem. She is bold, prismatic, the spine of a shrinking family. Is the gatherer collecting the proper pieces, the angular puzzle pieces, people, the angular puzzle pieces, making them fit within our frame. Which spices do we need? She knows turmeric for our son, sage, a sage for the turf. How do we grieve? Mother knows, feeling yet stoic as a rock for she will cry, but let go. For my sake, for her sake, her spine fights all of our battles to stay straight. Mother. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, and now I'm gonna read one about my dad who passed away, is it like seven years ago now? Eight years ago. Okay, it's called Osteopath. My father liked his architecture like a scotch, hold the rocks. He preferred simplistic molding with clean lines, always ionic, over Corinthian, no gaudy embossed walls or flowery floor patterns. Then my mother texted me that they had visited Barcelona on their honeymoon, that my father had a thing for gaudy. One example, Casabatio. When my tour of the fishtail house concluded, I didn't wanna say goodbye, but fade into an underwater jewel quality, fantasy of living in protective sea shapes, a second epidermis. I wanted to hide in his mollusk facades, held up by sinewy muscle and bone, a balcony with the likeness of Monet's water lilies. I wanted to blend like a chameleon into rooms like rainbow-beated lizard skin. I spent hours trying to feel the security of its bare-like den. There were shapes of water stagnant or rippled by the wind. I wanted to embrace the rooms, even the rooms filled with bones, fish scales, like my father, in awe despite never wanting architecture, lecture. I had been calling father for years for guidance through my slick, slippery life. Here were shimmery fish scales where I could see his reflection. Now I hear him in gaudy's walls, like an osteopath, listening to his own disintegrating bones. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, what else can I do? This one's called Little Black Seraphs. When packing our home for a move, my daughter, my little chihuahua, unpacks each box as soon as I can get one of them full. So I send my spirited toddler to the bird lady, Maria, the woman who knows the Ravens by name in Golden Gate Park, the Ravens who slowly sidestepped to be fed from Maria's hand. I send my daughter each day for a week to Maria's magical respite home. The Raven lady, her voice is of the highest pitch, from some seraphic island in the clouds. It's free, you can leave her here. Are you a nun, I'm thinking? Do you have any mean bone in that graceful, light-wing body? Maria's nun-like ways, calmness with exploding diapers. A child whisper, a Raven whisper. She taught me to watch the Ravens' googly eyes. Move like intelligent marbles. Examining and planning, is it safe? Maria's safe. I'm able to pack the house, I pick up my child and she hands me her precious, frosted pink mother's animal cookie. She had already eaten five in kid heaven with Maria. Bowls of bowtie, pasta, swimming in butter and salt, sugar, sugar, more sugar, to get the little ones for the day without mommy and daddy. In the car, her diapers and pants are full of soil and we could grow plants out of them. We have a new life by the beach. It lasts six years until I call Maria again, until I get the code to speak directly with the Ravens by the beach. Going through the garbage methodically, I ask them, how do they mourn their dead? The Ravens encircle me. They tell me they will protect my child. To this day, I lock eyes with Ravens. They crow Maria's voice saying, you did, you do, you did the best you could. Thank you very much. How many minutes are we now? I just want again to thank all of you for coming. This just means so much to me. So thank you, my friends and my family. So, okay, light one candle. Friends in the States think I'm embodying the Louvre, galvanizing in its multifaceted pyramid, waiting in line to wink at Miss Mona. Friends in the States think I'm hiding behind Musée d'Orsay's old train station clock. As art patrons, mirthfully lose time. Dolly slept here too. By December, time melts at warp speed. I have not collected any new cures, yet I still try daily potions to shrink or grow. Pharmacies package drug-free promises Americans would never fall for shark fin memory juice, honey-made snoring cures, magnesium for anxiety, botanical Viagra. Still some oil in my pockets to try for Maccabean miracles. I must keep at least one candle lit this season in my Alice in Wonderland life. I have a skeleton key to open my tiny crawl space where the smoke stacks churn in the dirtiest suburb of Paris. Northeastern Yvreser Seine, not the side of the Seine you're thinking of. Crawling on all fours for 300 euros a month, I wear a hard hat to avoid addling my brain when I stand upright. Very true. To finish my Qi Gong routine, to finish my heart sutra prayers, grasp at believing in another ohm. Remind myself that The Hunger Games was filmed here. 15 minutes of fame, even in this neighborhood. I hold the little porcelain angel you gave me, wings broken, so it's just a little cherubic boy now, hiding in my pocket, poking out every so often to see if this pandemic, my halt, reuniting our new love, flashback among the smoke and rats, among the immigrants who hide in the bleakest shadows. I search for the faintest light to keep me propelled towards Andromeda. Always a late start, gunshots already fired at the televised racetrack to box shops. Chinese, Cambodian, Laoshin, Thai, Muslim, spend their hard labor pittance to be paid at 8 a.m. in cheap espresso and cognac. My new love says I'm his princess, as he bets on horses in my name. A little later we stride along the Champ, masked but light-hearted, feeling light-footed, living free. This must be just a touch of the Spanish flu. Women from Emirates donning elegant makeup peek out behind natural mask burkas, peek out behind signs that read, parfum better than sex. Back in Ivory, greasy cafes, next to drunken gamblers are the only place to find a good turkey halal sandwich. Any other establishment will give you ham. I'm co-sure when it's convenient. Gluttony and sweet nothings fill me with roses and raspberry tarts, a substitute for my Bedouin life. Yet I must keep moving, must keep moving. Okay, a few more. This one's called Furious. We need dry vermilion, eye sockets, fast-twitch muscles for mountain ranges, a stubborn gut even as it oozes for surgical removal, need a tortoise shell or at least a camel lizard skin, hunting prowess for potato peels, passionate bonfire goodbye kisses, even as stormy clouds pelt down crab shells, any assorted, sorted crustaceans. Prayers on our scab needs, knees, dreams of thorny fighting roses, spring tulips that hold straight. Don't forget the marigolds are boldest, still our boldest, need to cover the crying children with snuggly sheets so they don't lose their lightness. So they have bedtime mirrors to reflect our collective trauma. We need a furious love of our flag, a furious love of ourselves. Oh, is this two more left? Okay, this is called Happy Poem. I want to write a Happy Poem, sugar cane stalks to suck on and chew, cerulean waters to swim and snorkel, smiling sea turtles, matchmaking grandmas, teetering and tangerine saris, bollywood over birrani with chilies, birrachini and polkadot bikinis. Do watch out for the cyclones. I want to write a Happy Poem. Hawaiian taffy and hula hoops, meditative glee linking rubber bands into Chinese jump ropes. Step on the crack and break your, Miss Mary Mack is in the house, truth or dare I never have I ever. Tin foil balls and hippy daisy chains. Do remember not to run after eating. I want to write a Happy Poem. Rubik's cubes and rummy cubes linked arms with campy Hebrew endorphinal musical bliss, chocolate chip cones, cherry fun dip, virus free days, dancing over grim, dancing grim over rolling hills in black forest. Doa Deer and Adelweiss, Grease one and two, Rocky Horror Picture Show, singalongs, even frozen and let it go. I am writing a Happy Poem. A family campmaid there, toddler delights and dirt, sensory heaven. She wants me to squeeze her head and turn the Mayan music up full blast. Oh, let's get back to the Happy Poem. Feeding stickered red delicious apples to mules named sassafras. Watch baby glide on maple glistened pancakes, the lardiest lard. Refresh morning imagining with daughter, dirty happy butts down rough and tumble crags. My hands and toes brand new. Forever family pictures, gaga and big gaga. Water play spinners, dog lips and doggie bags. Do wait for that other shoe to recenter the mine. We are writing a Happy Poem. Ski ball and pinball, bear hugs by the window, instead of honey bears and windows, swinging dance partners, slinky smooth dresses, wine coolers and karaoke bars, live theater, no zoom. Popcorn drizzled, butter drizzled over cinema delights. Peppa Pig, Pippa's button nose, doggie treats and tricks and treats, scratching Rupert's belly, instant therapy, freckles and farkel, farful and matzah ball soup, coogle and more comfort food, long deep talks with friends that stay, slumber parties, lightness abounds, playing light as a feather, laughter at large bar mitzvahs, Hava, Nagila and grape vines, grape bubble gum and old spring beds that double as trampolines. Peppermint patties and Chuck's friend's patty, parties with DJs and lavender wedding cake, spetzel from Germany and schnitzel with noodles, do write a Happy Poem. That's so good. Thank you. So one more, huh? One more, okay. One more and then on to the next. This is called, this is me, a jar of air. Green pebble eyes shine on from bloodshot tearing. This, a recent lunar wink for a million eyeball full moons me in 3D. Between a lit canvas of connect the dot to dots, I long to hold its truth like God in my still red palms. This basket festoon with rare pink petticoat blossoms open only at night when their skirts unpeel, emanating fragrant caches from intimate drawers. This, the neurotypical life, nothing is everything. I've stolen the Dalai Lama's baby brain, gives me the drug of nothingness. The Dalai Lama farts blissful clouds that I crave any day, yet I am there now in a cumulus wonderland, vacuous and complete. Thank you. Thanks so much. Fantastic. Please give another big hand for Ilana Yama. Thank you. Really nicely done. It is not an exaggeration for me to say that my life would not be the same without this next reader. I teach a lot now. It's my main way of supporting myself. I would not be a teacher without the encouragement of Alexandra Costulus, who, again, not an exaggeration to say she's changed my life. She's a Greek-American writer of poetry, fiction and journalism, and she's the founder and executive director of the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. Her students have gone on to run literary organizations, become professors at top universities, getting work published in peer-reviewed journals and landing prestigious book deals. As a writer, she's performed her work at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Litquake, Beyond Baroque, Beastcrawl, and all over the Bay Area and beyond. She is the founder and publisher of Dispatches from Quarantine as well, which won the 2022-23 California Arts Council Local Impact Award. Her upcoming novel is Persephone Stolen. Her upcoming collection of poems is Becoming Athena, and you can also subscribe to the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute newsletter to keep up and follow her on Medium. She's a great follow on Medium, and I am so happy and honored to have her here tonight. Please welcome Alexandra Costulus. I have to time myself because I will go over otherwise, and thank you so much for having me. I normally write kind of uplifting poetry, but today, because the theme is hysteria, I've been kind of thinking about hysteria and I started writing something kind of new that I'm a little embarrassed about, but we'll see. So I'll just start reading it, and if it's weird, I'll change to something else. So I've been thinking about all of the things that make women hysterical, and the idea of what hysteria means is wandering uterus and how it comes from this idea of the crazy woman. And I started thinking about my journey as a writer and things that happened to me along the way. So here we go, hysteria part one. Let me tell you about hysteria. Hysteria is getting rejected from Litquake seven or eight times before being accepted, despite being an active poet in the Bay Area since 2004. And my grandparents moving to San Francisco in 1941. My family has lived here longer than the children of the billionaires that fund it. The same billionaires who just got appointed to the board that closed my kid's school because the public school district couldn't afford to pay the $900,000 increase in rent. Also sitting on that board and part of the shutdown was the wife of the other billionaire, you know the one with the name on all the buildings with her perfect blowout on the Zoom call where I spoke up, but they closed the school anyway and they moved all the kids. And now instead of Procedio EES, it is an empty building in the middle of the Procedio with trash outside of it. Hysteria is wanting to be a writer my whole life and being great at it, but being told no for the first time after moving here because people want to make it harder than it is. Hysteria is having a uterus, a novel in progress and a soul crushing male professor turn in his critique of my work into a performance piece which he delivered as a little monologue in front of my classmates and then later died. I remember I told him his remarks on my fiction were verbally castrating and then he decided to call his piece Castrata and he delivered it with perfect elocution in front of 11 of my peers while I was mortified. Hysteria was some two years before sitting up in my apartment high with my friends mocking a poetry anthology we didn't even know he was in. The outlaw Bible of American poetry highlighting passages in purple crayon. Hysteria is me getting my first artist's grant and having one of the writers ask if they could even make the event a tribute to this writer and I said, okay, what the hell? Hysteria is another male professor at a woman's college in Oakland who serially sleeps with his most vulnerable even though he has a wife. You will never guess who it is and we will never tell. Hysteria is wondering if World War III has begun and we failed to notice. Hysteria is wondering in the back of my mind if these unprecedented times need air quotes. If I take off my mask and sing around this room does that mean the pandemic is over and we could all go back to our usual wishful thinking? My glasses are pandemic glasses, I can't see anything. Nobody cares about baking sourdough bread anymore or doing a TikTok dance or social justice really. Hysteria is being the only one that knows about her secret pregnancy that was never meant to be. Hysteria is hearing about the low key sex abuse and the well to do home that only gets whispered in my ear 30 years later. Hysteria is having two of my best friends who are each dying of two very separate cancers both brutally eviscerating them to the point where they are half molecules and half air. Hysteria is the late night male nurse who goes in with the girls who have tubes in them but cannot move and asks, baby why you mad at me at three o'clock in the morning and gets away with it? Hysteria is a rape culture president and a rape culture Supreme Court justice at the back of the party 35 years ago that could be today. Fingers clutching a six pack while his victim slinks out the door but he has handwritten calendars going back all those years. So you know he must be telling the truth. He's a founding father now you know. They say the revolutionary poets brigade once walked these streets until they died in their mother's basements but the real revolutionary was a young woman already martyred by the police for sleeping in her bed. The real revolutionary was already shot for eating McDonald's in the parking lot for being stoned for running for letting her hairline show a bit too much. Let me tell you about Hysteria. Hysteria is being overlooked your whole life and then suddenly seen and then hated. Hysteria is when one woman turns on the other one in jealousy and tries to take what she has because their father divided them. Hysteria is when you cover for your male colleagues so they can go on their second paternity leave while you can't afford to have kids. And Hysteria is telling me all of your sad secrets and then shitting on me while I'm the only one who knows your truth. Hysteria man. Hysteria goes on forever. The real revolutionaries are all dead now or immuno-compromised anyway. Thank you for laughing, because it's a dark place I told you. I'm sorry. Hysteria too. I'm still waiting for the real revolutionary poet to arrive so he can save me. Is he here yet? Get this lady off the mic. Did you see him? Oh yeah, he was here earlier. I saw him come in and adjust the microphone and then he left. You know the voice of our generation is a man too. Or it's a new bowel woman with a flat stomach who wears false eyelashes and takes sexy selfies on Instagram while complaining about her mental health and feigning weakness to get out of things. A woman is only batshit as we let her be. When she turned 40 though, the female poet stopped giving a fuck. She said what she meant and they paraded her through the streets for having a hairline that was showing and she grabbed for the ass but the last minute but it was already too late. The morality police are lurking everywhere. The thought police are too. They will clip your wings if you get too big. They will slice you and dice you and they will say it was an accident and that you hanged yourself in jail with this plastic bag because you were hysterical because you had just lost a baby because you were guilty but really who knows what happened from when the cameras went on loop to that plastic bag and maybe they planted the plastic bag there after they tortured you and humiliated you and threatened you so that there was only one logical choice and that was to kill yourself and you just became another hysterical woman with another hairline showing and a sad story amid a million other sad stories. Don't mind me, I'm just bitter. The real revolutionary poets will be here in a minute. Anyway, they said, we'll take a photo with them when they come on the precise corner in front of the coolest part of North Beach and then it will legitimize our whole operation. Thank you for your application, they said but we're fucking full. But you're a little too much, a little too much. We're still waiting for the real revolutionary poets to please stand up, please stand up. Let's make obnoxious comments and get paid for them by the universities that employ us so people can feel like they too can pay 50 grand and become a certified poet. Yes, why don't we, shall we let's? This lady, you see her up there? She must not be a revolutionary because she didn't do the right TikTok dance. She only has frizzy hair pulled into a messy bun and is pushing a baby stroller into the library or the back of the bookstore. We'll tell her she can't do a reading here because we assume she doesn't have an MFA and then we'll try to charge her $750 an hour while her colleague gets to read here for free. Well, a young white woman from Ohio is here with purple and red streaks in her hair and a Le Bray piercing and she can pour signature drinks that cost the 750 an hour and we can say that she has to pay for the bartender in order to book a reading in our space. Yes, that's a lovely idea and then let's let her grad school classmates read here for free. Oh, yes, let's. After all, we have to pay our people, said the ex Googlers who now own every bookstore. You don't have to belong here fuzzy haired lady poet. You are not poet enough or novelist enough or professorial enough. You're not what we had in mind. We would love to pay you but you gave us all your ideas in our brain rape meeting already and now we're out of funds and here are some articles on leadership. I've posted to my LinkedIn so I can look like I'm really using that money that they've invested in my startup. Thank you for your ideas but we are going to take our best practices and we are packing up shop and we're moving our headquarters to Austin. We've graduated from San Francisco but we may set up shop at once in Austin too and what we'll only collaborate with the full on white ladies, not the marginal white ladies because our diversity, equity and inclusion cup is full. In fact, it runneth over. This house has good bones, you know. Yeah, so we're gonna go in a different direction. When we come back, we'll be looking for more diversity but it won't be you. It will be a younger, less jaded, more affluent immigrant that we'll pick to feel good about ourselves so we can look inclusive and feel good. Who is going to make out with me after my reading said the male memoirist. Actually, he tweeted this at his admirers after 15 seconds of fame was up and of course, he still gets a stream of local admirers waiting. Sir, sir, may I help you, sir? If a female writer did that, she'd be dead for her hairline to be showing killed by the morality police reeducated to oblivion. I'm sorry, but this is the hysteria police. Your misogyny is still showing. We will have to curtail it. I can see your hairline just a little bit. Yes, I knew you were an indie publisher and your penchant for young women, and your threadbare close call me psychic. But in your ability to bury manuscripts written by brilliant women, that really got me going. I know, really, no. I know I can never be a part of your press because I don't have the right ISBN numbers. So I'm just going to eat this voodoo donut here and push my stroller through the hall at AWP and wait for new-bile 28-year-olds to make a poetry event where people cooler than me with their read and their read poetry and their slip and charge 50 bucks a ticket. They'll see me with my stroller and ask, what is it like to be a mother and an artist? And I will say, between frying chicken nuggets and wearing leggings, that it's great, but they won't believe me because they know that their own mothers were miserable and they'll confide their own desires to become famous writers too someday and how their worst nightmare is becoming the white-picket fence life and moving back to the small town where they grew up only to become like all their friends. So they will take a lot of selfies and say shocking things on the internet in order to look tough. And I will push my baby stroller and tell them this, honey, let me tell you that when you've almost bled to death in a Bangkok hospital for trying to become a mother, reading fugitive literature about past lives in a low-key military dictatorship on the waning years of the monarchy that the white-picket fence life doesn't look half bad. In fact, the white-picket fence life is in fact a welcome relief. Plan B will take us out of all this hustling. Plan A, if I can't be the tallest chuparosa, then I will take Plan B or the blue pill, the white-picket fence life. A or B, no revolutionary poetesses here waiting in the wings, no flying saucers or NFTs. If she doesn't shut up about how the male indie publisher who crushed her spirit and her work, maybe we can be friends. Maybe we could also drag her into the basement in broad daylight like they did that lady at Stanford last week and we'll get away with it just like Brock Turner did because of that judge. I mean, we're the golden boy and this is America. I mean, if you drink weak tea enough and eat nothing but dry toast, you too can become a perfect person or the right sort of poet in just three days. Sad story, too long, don't read, in short, don't let the bastards grind you down. Okay. Thank you. You want a dark one or a happy one? Dark, okay, thank you. Okay, this is the last one because I'm running out of time, but I appreciate you're listening to all my inner shit. All right. High yourself. High yourself is a medium post about coaching. Reading and writing is a medium that no one is, oh, by the way, no one is coming to save us, my fellow hysterics. Mama, you can do it, but they will reject you when you come to the library with a baby stroller trying to rent a room because of your frizzy hair. I keep waiting for the hero to save me, but he never comes. The voice of our generation is a young white woman, of course. Once you have a baby in your belly, you're already dead culturally anyway because the culture can't fantasize about what it would be like to put a baby in your belly anymore so you don't get invited to things unless somewhere younger than you drops out. So you sneak in the back. Try not to get hysterical, they said. Don't confabulate everything. Cut your hair in public, burn your hijab in a fury, flash your sparkly, too dense breasts in a way that's offensive and lights up the mammogram. I keep waiting for the real poets to come in and save me, but they're not here. The world is burning. I have lined up all my doctor's appointments and we are slowly dying. Hell hath no fury, yada, yada, like a woman's scorn, blah, blah, blah. We're all moving on from COVID. We're all, if we're all stupid together and then the world is under control, put my kid in summer camp after school coloring in Lego so I can churn out more text. We're all moving on from COVID, but Putin's got his finger on the button, yet we preen here on the stage about how cool we are, even me, in this cool gray city of love like the universe gives a damn. Oh, revolutionaries, where have you been all my life? I'm still waiting for you to come here, waiting for you to suck the life out of me. All the good ones die young. The rest of us stuck here to watch their kingdom stripped away from them. The bad guys go on forever. The revolution is canceled due to SARS-CoV-19 and understaffing and the great resignation. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation, Amin. In the spirit of all the young guns, I just wanna say it was great to hear some new shit tonight. So please, another big round of applause for Alexandra Costuelas, everybody. That was wonderful, thank you. Good, I knew I curated a good reading tonight and this is even more so. I am sometimes known as the organizer of the Beast Crawl Literary Festival in Oakland. I could not have brought the Beast Crawl back without the help of this next reader. Kellyanne Parker is a queer Latina poet living with Disassociative Identity Disorder. She's the author of Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind from Nomadic Press, like Alana's book, available on the table over here. And I know I get the authors are gonna sign for you if you buy a copy from them tonight. Her book chronicles her healing journey as a survivor of sexual and physical violence. She's a regular Bay Area Feature and has been in numerous anthology, including Light on the Walls of Life, tribute to Laurence Ferlinghetti, as well as the Colossus series. You can follow her on Facebook at Kellyanne Parker Poetry or on her website, KellyanneParkerPoetry.com. Please give a huge San Francisco library hand for Kellyanne Parker. Thank you, Paul. And what a great night. Great to meet poets and see some familiar faces as well. So I will read a couple of things on the topic of hysteria, which is kind of fitting going with my book as well. But the first poem I'm gonna read, I usually like to open with something that tells you just a little bit about who I am. It's called What Do You Call Home? They say you can never come home again. And for me, that's really true. For home to me was not a place but a person, a humble, modest living person. Her name was Lupita Teresa Mesa, mia bullita, my grandmother. The person for whom my daughter's middle name is Lupita, the woman who prayed the rosary and walked everywhere, who taught ESL and volunteered at church and library. She said she was the richest woman in the world and meant it, not rich in things, as a widow who raised her orphaned nephews and children and a three bedroom, two bath house in Panorama City, perfect for a family of 14. Thank you for laughing, a house full of happy noises, the sound of guitars and song of poetry read, a crowd of people bursting out of every room, all busy following their passions. Heated political debates in the living room and cooking and laughter in the next, all orbiting this tiny center of our universe. She kept me from floating into nothingness and tethered me to earth. I thought her strong and solid and permanent. Had I known how tenuous it was, I would have skipped work for one more chance to sit at her kitchen table, her altar of magic. Or a cup of tea, stories and family and folklore would transport me in a magic carpet ride. I cling to traces of her like rose-scented lotion. I hold the rosary, the one with a tiny magnified picture of Nuestra Señora for whom she was named. And now I grasp it any detail like the sound of her laugh to will beck the feel of her hands clasping mine. I close my eyes and I smell hibiscus flowers and taste their nectar. I imagine the cactus that climbed the stucco and the hummingbirds that nested there, the giant oak tree that I used to climb and the parrot that roost there still and the lone cockatoo who would rather be a parrot than be a lone. How they would circle at dusk and settle in the tree and make a ruckus. The neighbors weren't fans, but she loved them, so I did too. I remember how they fell instantly silent when the sun was gone, like the flick of a light switch. And now that switch has darkened the window and obscured my view for the person for whom I once called home. I usually open up by saying that according to the World Health Organization, 25% of the global population lives with mental illness and addiction. And the number one cause is trauma and people don't talk about it, so I talk about it. That's how I roll. So this next poem is not so much about trauma, but what it's like to live with a dissociative disorder. It's called instructions to insulate from moonlight. Where malachite drink Hawthorne berries prepare for the next cycle in the infinite loop and remember to breathe as the sun starts to fade and paints clouds from below while anxiety grows into a flower named dread. Snapping photos to steal light, which I hide in my pocket to later conjure safety, but land, land eludes me. And I began pacing in a rhythm. This is the dance of my culture. This is the dance of my youth while my feet lift off the ground. And so I float and I spin with no handhold in sight, no means to make it stop until I'm swept up in the current. And then the images come. First like super-aid flash hypersensory, then to desensory fog, the taste of bile and rot. And it slowly slows and nauseating, spinning rapid flipping familiar state of dissociation, a familiar task that evade me like opening doors. And so I wait before them until memory returns. And after running from this burning building of a body, avoiding mirrors to evade the reflection of the wild eyed animal eye shine of the familiar and the totem. And then nothing, then the nothing familiar, nothing, weighty blanket of nothing and I return, time lost, but grateful I've survived another until the next full moon. And I am going to read something. Sometimes I start out with an idea of what I'm gonna read and then I change it up. So I am gonna read a poem. I used to call this the crazy poem, but now it's called I the living fractal. As it reaches through the earth to swallow and obliterate, to consume and erase. I keep close in view of the hydra of my daydreams, resides in no watery grave, but everywhere after dark. In the eye of the storm, such safe insulation from the winds of violence, let free the satellites chosen cautiously, consciously, as if cradled into orbit, who dare pass the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, so meteor-scarred, rings worth the price of the protection they afford, where outside blades of saws torment, invisible helixes held within. The vacuum permits not light, but only aquatic sounds. Like blood, pulsing in ears and chest. The sturdy wall of chaos, entrenched in solitude and random, like wildflowers. Will the artist be friend's madness? And because I'm really sarcastic sometimes, I have a more finished version of this and it's in a computer and I can't get it out, so you're gonna get the rough draft tonight. But this draws on my gallows humor, not named here. And the people had so much stuff that they had to create places where they built over wildlands and wetlands to create places so that they could store their extra stuff that they couldn't keep because they didn't have room. And they were so important that they had to have someone living there to make sure that no one took their stuff that they didn't have room for. And the people celebrated and it was good and the people rejoiced. Amen, hallelujah. All right, wait, I'm not paying attention. How much time do I have? Yeah. Okay, good. I switched gears and that slowed me down, so I apologize. I have a fun poem that I will close out with. And I was gonna read something new, but I can't find it quickly enough, so here we go. I'm going to read. Oh, this is a great grounding piece. It's called The Voices of My Ancestors. It's a casual conversation between the hummingbird and I, that cheerful scolding I enjoy. Oh, the crow has his opinions and I give full audience to his complaints. The crow, my fellow traveler, turkey vulture, my guide. The parrots, my grandmother. The oak trees, my roots. Anchored deeply in golden hills, these living phoenixes are cleansed by the sun to protect me from night. We talk all day and night, the voices of my ancestors, talking and singing, cooking and creating. My grandma Lupe stirs the pot. She holds my hand and stirs and hums. The smell of lemon tea, the sound of slipper shuffling are to me the sound of safety. And I found entry in this in-between space, the space of invisibility where I'm not alone. An astral traveler. Here a welcome resident outside the busyness of business. I convene with the dead. To see them you must slow down, step off, let go. Here you have to listen, here there is no status quo. Death is a beautiful equalizer, a then diagram of then and now. Here, green paper means nothing. Back in the eternal, I'm the conduit. If you want to find home, find your ancestors, look into my eyes and ask your question. And I have this one last piece I'm gonna read. This is a really old poem and for me it's also a really grounding piece. It's called Solitude. I find comfort in solitude. It's misunderstood and often mistaken for loneliness. It's not the same. Loneliness is a vacant crater. Solitude is different. Quiet conversation with yourself. Being alone but not feeling alone. Comfortable quiet. Where the outspoken word is unwelcome and would shatter the calm stillness. Quiet as its own language. Understood only by the speaker listener as one in the same. One's own true first language. I speak it well and do not pass it on to others. The part of me that's not shared spoken here in the code of poetry. Seen not felt by others as they would see their green and not mine. Practice your language for there all lies in all answers. Answers true and just as if given to you by some higher power and perhaps it is. Quiet conversations with you and your God. Some call it conscience, others inner self. Call it what you like. I have my own name and I keep it to myself. Thank you. Wow, thank you. That was an outstanding reading. I was an outstanding evening of poetry. Thank you to all the poets. One more time a big hand again for Kellyanne Parker and also for Alexandra Costulus and also for Alana Aoyama. Thank you so much. I'll refrain from sharing some of my own work tonight because I wanna give you guys a few moments to mingle and talk and of course we have books for sale and like I said, the authors will sign those for you and but I want to make a disclaimer, we should be out the door by 715, 720. Is that about right? Yep, thank you, John. But thank you again, everybody for coming tonight and supporting these wonderful, wonderful authors with the very important and vital work that they read tonight.