 He has a deep background in community organizing and convening and he digs performance art in punk rock And he's also the author of the chapbook crunchy eggs. Please welcome Felix Solano-Varvitz So I will be reading a few pieces from crunchy eggs tonight It's a chapbook that my friend Raquel Gutierrez helped put me out under Econo textual objects It's a series of micro fiction poetry. It's place-based about Riverside, California It's about brown trans labor Trauma and growing up as a jova's witness in a Chicano household in the inland empire So the first piece I'm that coconut that jumped off the tree and almost cracked your head open while you were napping in my uncle's hammock I'm spiraling out of control and I'm screaming about a gender liberation the whole way down. I'm talking to you whitey My uncle is a big brown beautiful man and he will be home soon soft-spoken Hard-working and Yahweh fearing with the tattoo on his inner left forearm that'll tell you how crazy his life has been He drives away to go heat up the furnace every day at 4 30 in the morning and he'll be home soon So you better get the hell out of here He has been around a long long time and he has really paid his dues. Have you? hashtag brown trans temporal a Soul that is satisfied will tread down comb honey, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet Proverbs 27 7 I come from a long line of orange pickers curators warehouse workers artists and Avon ladies We were born and raised in the inland empire Sometimes we lived so close to the train tracks that the house would rattle and shake But we figured out how to roll with it seamless like at night after dinner It was satisfying to hear that whistle blow now looking at my place of origin from high above I can see patches of overstuffed brown sofas blood Big dirt backyards barbecues secrets baptisms and empty cans of beer My memories burn soft glowing beige and back then I was a little buff golden brown matcha kid Protecting his beautiful mother and I was always flame in hot angry because everything was dangerous. I Was trained to be a witness I was taught to preach from door to door at bus stops on street corners and through letter writing The book of Revelation scared the shit out of me, but I really liked it The Technicolor seven-headed beast was too familiar. I didn't want everlasting life. I just wanted to live a little Dressed like a man. I was de-baptized in a mosh pit of angry brown youth Running and crashing flailing my limbs about Thoughtless but not moving fast enough to avoid hearing that big question Was that a boy or a girl? Getting bigger punches to the rib cage when being read as the blur of a brown boy I wanted to feel that pressure to leave my body to die in obscurity. I liked it I traded in the fear of hearing someone speak in tongues for the freedom of punk rock Letting our earwax drip onto the cardboard we found in dumpsters signs reading Who are you protecting with pamphlets to go along copies stolen from our local kinkos? Trying to outrun the gas cans skill sharing plucking orange balls of fire from the sky We were running black flag grudos too butch to be good too brown to be bad. I was raised by zealots White queer subtext film screenings in the Hernandez household were held on the regular Lydia my mother was the curator and Rosie my aunt was the best damn salesman I've ever met a mean supernova lady She could make the white women on the fancy side of town feel really good about themselves So that we could then take their money and put it into masa to pay the card note I was nine years old fourth generation in learning about the cash regenerative factor that masa obtains It was magic during Sunday meetings I'd be secretly sketching drawings of lots wife in my book of Bible stories and thinking that where I lived She would have turned into a 500 pound pillar of masa at the top of Mount Rubidow Encased in yellow corn husks so big and so bright that they could make her out even on the east side My maternal great great grandparents are from Juana Wato The city's most famous tourist attraction is the mummies of Juana Wato Which are located in their own museum on the side of the Municipal Cemetery in the Tepe Tapa neighborhood and There lives one of the smallest brown baby mummies ever My maternal grandmother is from 14th Street and Riverside She taught me to drive the speed limit through the orange groves and clear past old packing houses straight over to the University So that I wouldn't die together. We could go anywhere. We still could She's like the glitter at the bottom of a bag of oranges clenched by a brown hand at the freeway entrance. I Was taught an unhealthy fear of God and a healthy animosity towards the Riverside police department to be a law Biting and church going brown citizen of Riverside Driving by the juvenile hall detention facility and having my mother tell my sister and I that if we were bad That is where we would go we the good kids. She just doing her due diligence Shouting all cops are bastards depressed and repressed Sitting at the bottom of the Santana River and making our plans to bust out King Cobra for you and me Shattering bottles and sharing space Waiting me deep through our beloved shitty river. It wasn't safe, but it was ours you on one side me on the other Who are you protecting? Framed by Ritchie Valens. I was walking down the street Minding my own affair when two policemen grabbed me unaware Sleeping on concrete with nothing left to lose Degree in my left back pocket from the University sleepwalk on a loop POC only spaces meeting intense Gloria was the punkest a true Chola rebel girl He says is your name Henry. I say why sure he says you're the boy. I'm looking for I Learned to chew on those chicharrona is hard and fast just like my grandmother did in her youth Hard so I can't hear him yelling but soft enough to hear myself think Fast like I've been packing up and moving for years and slow enough that I didn't choke In a dream. I was Che Charon the Cyclops and I was floating up to heaven. I wandered around there a bit I met someone she was an old white woman from our congregation who died a long long time ago She was of the anointed and she asked me what happened to you that made you so fucked up I told her I have no parents and I've been struck with everlasting dry mouth I wake up and read the writing on the front of my giant piece of fried pork skin a Blank canvas worthy of having at least five of the ten commandments written on it. It says to me dear Felix Don't be so hard on yourself quit thinking about her quit smoking and her and him her and him and her him and them I traded in my Bible tracts for anarchist pamphlets and punk show flyers. I live to collect things I want to believe that it is all about perspective in this life But I know way down deep in my brown butthole that it's not I saw the future in my vomit yesterday afternoon And in that future, I'm not as chunky as I was before I set out on that dirt road littered without owl pellets Crap containing the deconstructed skeletons of mice in this town of you snooze you lose and it's no one's fault Fuck the system. I've got to get out of here, but I've forgotten which number to call Just like a bird fleeing away from its nest so is a man fleeing away from his place Proverbs 27 8 Do I ever feel settled? I Feel like a bird and I know I'm a better brown dude now because I ran away with her for a little bit I know she once lived in Arizona in a trailer with her lady friend from the congregation I know this because she took me with them. She wasn't gay It was just that her husband liked to beat the shit out of her every now and then with the belt So she decided to run far away from that leaving her grown children behind Irene the woman she took up with was big and silent. She made her feel safe She was butch like I learned to be I was a baby then a balancing act a trailer in the middle of the desert where they could Find some natural affection not far enough from civilization a new home. Whatever gets you through We all sort of winged it critiques of capitalism over my grandmother's enchiladas Everyone had bad credit form a collective and have everyone happily apply max them out why anarchists need to learn Thank you