 She's a writer, filmmaker, a performance artist, and the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Subrosa, so my favorite books ever, and Memoir, How Poetry Saved My Life, probably also one of my favorite books ever. Please welcome Amber Dawn. Hi. I feel like this book of poems has so much to do with San Francisco, and hopefully I can make that apparent to all of you. So as Michelle said, I wrote Subrosa in 2010. It was released. It was a fantasy novel about missing women and girls and sex workers. And then a couple years later, I wrote How Poetry Saved My Life, A Hustler's Memoir, which was my own story about sex work and survival. And what I realized through writing those two books is that writing trauma and healing and recovery can be a really lonely occupation. So I was really looking for a form, some kind of structure within poetry that would help me feel less alone, like it was less a solitary process. And I actually found that form. It was called a glosa. It's this wonderful poem that's a call-and-response poem. So if you were to become a glossatier, a glosser, you would grab a quatrain or four lines from one of your favorite poets. And on top of those four lines, you would build your own poem. And this form gave me a lot of strength. So I'm going to be introducing you, or perhaps reintroducing you to five poets, and then reading you my own work that I built from there. The first poet is Brenda Shaughnessy, and her quatrain reads, I'm angry, I'll take back the night. Using me to swoon at your questionable light, you had me chasing you the world's worst lover over and over. Queer infinity. We tried to make the 2000s a holdfast decade. Many of us got sober or adopted cockeyed dogs named Radar. We craved long-term goals, five-year plans, but by when this time the world really seemed to be ending, Supermoon, Katrina, Cyclone Stand, Frankenstorm, ice caps melted in our ozone epoch, bubbles burst. We knew there'd be no reply during the tsunami, still we phoned Kerala and Chiang Mai, our queer trans-migrant families, spanned the four corners, there's a crisis in every time zone. It's true I'm angry. I'll take back the night. Use me to call Amsterdam at midnight to relay a friend's death notice. Use your car to drive to the airport and to the airport again. Use her stovetop to make two weeks worth of one pot meals for the freezer. Use my axe to chop wood for the funeral fire. Use each other's raw bodies to remind ourselves how to pray. Queer grief is a blueprint. We got this shit-wired tight. Maybe we've become too good at losing. Are we trauma bonded? I can't speak for the whole, only myself. I'd sooner howl at a wounded moon. Yes, I might swoon at a questionable light, but at least I still swoon. My scabby kneecaps may always weep pink. I'm so often floored. I'll never be a two-feet-on-the-ground kind of girl. Let me guess, age didn't temper your passion either. Let me guess, your passion like mine only became more strategic. It's not called a movement for nothing. Anonymous or rough queer sex was our coup de corps. Many of us couldn't love ourselves until our gaping paths were licked like wounds. Young guns and leather boots, odd ones with knuckle tattoos. You had me chasing you for years before I understood what I was after. An antidote that smoked with the same sweet fever as the venom. It can be fine if you share the sting, stomach the poison together. Many of us gathered our lovers, renamed friends, sister and brother. We wrote the books that queerlings now read in college. We made films to screen at Sundance. Our scrappy manifestos got exposure, one million YouTube views. Let's erect guerrilla monuments to those who didn't make it. Never confuse, hold fast with hold still. There's so much yet to do. Swoon, I say, swoon forever. Apathy is the world's worst lover over and over, queer infinity. Thanks, Whistler. Sina Karris is the next poet, also a Canadian. Her quatrain reads, Which lifetime beyond what brawn, who knew where the road would take us? Neat, neat, the rows of apple trees there in the valley, red summers, the heat. Queer land. Something happened to me at Backroads Pizza in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Locals say the land is magic, although white people are always claiming land is magic. The woman who non-consensually hugged too long wore bone jewelry, worship Gaia, and wanted me to know that because I live in the world, I must love all the world. Over her shoulder, I watched genderqueer acrobats Valdes on the pool table, a loner empty his flask into a can of cola. I ached with odd longing, but from which lifetime beyond what brawn, who or what was I love sick for? Crying can help. Eyeball orgasms release endorphins in past lives, psychic saltwater, they say. I licked a ramekin of peppermill gravy clean at Ria's Bluebird in Atlanta, Georgia. Simone de la Ghetto bent Clyde over a picnic table. Juva carefully considered his huevos, Jerry Lee his bacon. Annie Oakley and Scarlett Harlett's Cardinal Mainz bookended the morning. The movement, our mantra. We are artists, innovators, geniuses, geniuses, innovators, artists, innovators, geniuses, and we are hungry and infinity. I presumed I knew where the road would take us, not the interstate, the intersections of our remarkable survival would be the place we landed. I was younger, and homecoming seemed far more romantic than fuck coming. Queer fuck was everywhere. Home was a blue sky, all but sci-fi idea. Maybe fancy land in Humble County, California. Maybe idle dandy near Nashville, Tennessee. A place with a goat named Ali Sheedy. Free chickens, all kikis. That's the dream, right, on the other side of mighty America, where the eggs in the nest aren't normal, normal. Grapefines aren't neat, neat. The rows of apple trees aren't really rows at all. Just fruit, handsomely idling like the laxadaisical stacks of books at modern times collective in San Francisco, where I abandoned the pages of Go magazine to scope the daydreamy staff person from behind the till. Their name, pronouns, relationship status, dating preferences, kinks unknown. But oh so precious, with the paperback spine of the left hand of darkness I imagined my daisy print underwear in their teeth. I carried my fantasies along scorching 24th Street. Why must I wear black in August? I always fall in flummoxed love there in the valley, red summers, the heat. That's for you San Francisco. Speaking of Juba, who is referenced in that poem, we are on a three-person tour with Lea Horlick, Vivek Shreya, and myself, and we're going to Oakland tomorrow, where we'll be performing with Juba Columka. We're at the Laurel Bookstore, so if anyone has Oakland folks, they'd like to message, tell them to go to the Laurel Bookstore tomorrow, we'd love to see your Oakland folks. Next poet is Lydia Qua, and she says, what makes someone capable of creating a new paradigm and living it, who owns that willingness to create? Over $5 lattes, a dear old and I reminisce upon are all-time favorite suicide plans. XYZ Pharmacy, I say, buy shady methadone then head up Hastings to the second Empire skyscraper I have, a rooftop key. I wonder if you can still score physies at XYZ, dear old asks. She makes culture for the city now, me, university, square pegs, cobbled into round holes, gray mare horrors and a greener graze. Do we miss the glory days? Retrospect, blur, I can look back until I see double. What makes someone capable of so much change? Hand-to-mouth survival is off the schedule and it seems I have freed up time for existential questions. Aesthetics fluxed when I realized I would live All that beauty that once wanted nothing to do with me is now ubiquitous. Beaumont Pink is my newest mentor. Color therapy? Whatever helps us carry on. There are no wrongs. Forgiveness is tactile learning. Touch, movement, sound, repeat, self-love mastered by mnemonics, the sing-song rhyme of creating a new paradigm. We hear with our ear. Rhythm helps your tender heart move and the wise old owl lived in the oak the more she saw the less she spoke. There is a question I still haven't answered in verse. What happened to the others? I lost more than mercury and sweat during detox. Where's my down-at-the-heel line come up, dreamers, beasties, the pretty brass, those existing by the minute and living it so close to the bone? Where is their microphone? What stage has been erected for the disaffected? What wall to mount a crack jaw collage? The exhibition hall is narrow space. Think of the mines mislaid in this pinch. Oh, but how loss makes us look for glint and change when empire's trash is our pieced resistance. Are you like me? Did you have to see the precise shade of your own spilled blood when you knew what you must do? Then you also know struggle and art making can be the same. Then you also know who owns that willingness to create. Hmm. I'll do two more for you. This poet maybe is someone you know, Leah Lakshmi, Pipe Snas, Emma Raschina. Her and I have been poetry pen pals for a while now and they just are kind of getting smuddier and kinkier the more we write each other. So I'm kind of getting kinked are right now. So this is this goes out to all the leather folks who are perhaps in this room perhaps right now. Leah says, I love every loud mouth hard ass fuck with you skin soft like a loquat as they punch your cunt into infinity fam. I love girls who will fuck you up for no and for every good reason. The first woman besides your mother to slap your face painted her bedroom floor red a few days before your date and your knees sank into gummy coats of enamel why she made you wait. Her window was wide open undraped and August heat bulldozed in and all your sounds blowhorned out. She said, relax your jaw and you wondered what made her shoes leather and if your cheeks smarted as handsome bright as the floorboards afterwards her pupils were lust drug dilated. I love a dirty fuck, she cooed. I love every loud mouth hard ass fuck. With you being so spring chicken you hardly knew what you loved but you bought yourself a harness and a cock at the woman's sex shop enjoying the other dikes and the phallus procession. The dog collar and wrist cuffs acquired for fashion or foreshadowing lip piercings damned your smile your scalp confessed to a big razor you made anger your order when you pronounced your cunt a warrior the daddies trained their mad eyes that you suited denim rough but bare skin soft like a loquat as they punched your cunt into infinity femme. You never considered yourself femme until a lover hailed you femme slut pretty pretty honorific feminine worship this lover devoted please femmegasm for me soak the sheets with your femme. If memory serves this may have been the first time you were proud of your body only a fire gut can ejaculate like you a spark plug sweet thing a true lovers of girls who will fuck you up for no one could have told you the dearest souls were all rough trade this bit of brilliant showed itself bit by bit fuck by a loud mouth hard ass fuck you learn to receive adoration just as well as you took a beating no one could have told you adoration would trial and thrill you more than the welts on your young skin reverences markings are permanent and so reverence you were given and for every good reason and hopefully with another familiar poet Eli Coppola who rate our honors each year by having the Eli Coppola memorial poetry chapbook award this is what Eli said what I said I pretty much meant what I am has multiplied and divided what I stole has been taken away from me and what I have stumbled upon has pleased me most now Eli's poem has posed a very important question for me the question perhaps is something you all could help me out with after the show a group of sluts is called what a lot of things that are in groups are named pretty interesting things but a group of sluts is called what cream pie is what I saw at the kitten theater a clutter of cats a kindle of kittens a dole of turtles a dole of turtle doves what a gape of porn stars is what I saw this is the most used vowel in the English language what is schwa in a French accent like d'il say it a slap of masturbators a fairy tale of jacks looking back this was a blessed event what I said I pretty much meant the internet is a boner killer everyone watches gang bangs from home and the kitten theater is now a pottery barn somewhere there are still dykes in ratty blonde wigs working a brass pole right somewhere a twink in silver briefs tea bags a widower's eyelid my desire dates me I want to go back to the 90s but without the cocaine a what a stellar of bar stars a heist of queer diamonds what I am has multiplied and divided into personalities and paragraphs line by line edits I have an office key I have a well-behaved pomeranian a set of onite a flatware and yet a bullwhip a braided kangaroo hide I crack off-color jokes for kids that will never understand the punchline I sleep tight with five milligrams of Ambien what I have is imposter syndrome I still have a proud scar I can still speak with a forked tongue what I stole has been taken away from me and a what a recall of memories is what remains do you remember that time when we all got bent a peep of chickens a clutch of chicks a what a fluff of aging sluts a what a muff of ex-lovers all gathered on the same coast the same city the same black lit leather bar the last homocile standing I'll hold the ceiling up with my spare hand my cream pie is still grandiose what I have stumbled upon has pleased me most thank you very much Amber Dawn she has copies of that collection at the back of the room our next reader is in the van with Amber Dawn it's Vivek Shreya and this is his new book She of the Mountains