 He regularly organizes poetry shows in the Bay Area and he's currently the curator and the head organizer for the San Francisco Queer Open Mic. He was born in Toluca, Mexico and grew up in Albany, California. This is Baruch. She had several self-portraits in which she painted an object on her forehead. If it was an image of her husband, it would be titled, Thinking of Diego. If it was an image of a skull, it would be titled, Thinking of Death. Oh Frida, if only I could live as a small painting on your forehead, resting gently on your unibrow like this, with a small painting on my forehead of a donut. It would be titled Frida Kahlo, Thinking of Baruch Porra Cernandes, Thinking of a Donut. And at the top of the donut, where its forehead would be between the sprinkles, a small painting of Frida Kahlo. And on her forehead, a small painting of me. And on my forehead, a small painting of a donut. And so on, and so on, and forever, and forever, and forever, and forever. Thank you. This next poem is called The Sexual Fetishes of San Francisco. Some you may have heard of, some you may have not. Boom, boom, holy shit, logica. People who get turned on by the expanding of the universe. Nebu Phantasma Gorophiles, sexual arousal from the belief that some people turn into the fog after they die. Nebula Files, people aroused by the fog. Ifano Brogla Sonica, sexual arousal from rubbing your genitals on broken iPhone screens. Dushbagophilia, sexual fetish for men under 20s who work in startups, are blind with greed and have an undeserved sense of accomplishment. Vinyasa-vinyasa-phlophilia, sexual fetish for white women with dreadlocks, usually wearing rostinate hats, Mexican floor-coric skirts, tattoos of Africa who have never left the U.S. Azurophilia, deep desire for blue things like the sky and birds flying in it. Avisotomy, sex with birds. Orgasmilo Amnesica, only being able to come while being fucked during a panic attack brought on from the fear that no one will remember who you are after you die. Transport of fanatism, sexual pleasure derived from the fantasy of getting anywhere in the city on time using San Francisco's public transportation. Vorarephilia, fantasies of devouring others' whole or being swallowed whole by a lover or chewing on a cock with some sriracha sauce on it. Or Tapatiosauce. Dacrophilia, when one is aroused by the tears or sobbing of other people. Woe is Iphilia, when one is aroused by the tears or sobbing of writers. Cedophilia. Arousal from the torso-splitting emotional pain of not having children brought on by seeing pictures of friends with their beautiful children on Facebook, then weeping uncontrollably, then getting a boner. Mission Ophila Orgasmica. Sexual need to eat food made by Mexicans to be surrounded by murals made by Mexicans, but the need to not have to look at or deal with Mexicans. I am the Nitosphilia, only being able to come while fucking a person who is wearing a Batman costume. Taco Donut Truck Olip Pyromanosis. Only being able to reach Orgasm while on a taco truck speeding out of control that is on fire while eating jelly donuts, but not knowing where the jelly donuts came from, then realizing that the jelly donuts don't have jelly in them, leading to severe panic attacks. But there's a cliff ahead, no brakes, the steering wheel just spins by itself, and the jelly donuts are jelly-less. Jelly-less. Adventuro Magellanosis. The need to go on walking and walking forever until you truly actually reach the end of the world. Then fall off, arms wide open, open mouth, breathing in and in and in. Thank you. This next poem I wrote after I started on my blog, it's called Notes From My Back Fat. I started a conversation with my body because I went back to the gym to try to, I don't know, because I had a free membership for a while, and my body just hated me, so I just started writing these dialogues with it because I was like, all right, body, we're going to eat some gluten-free oatmeal now, and my stomach was like, fuck your gluten-free oatmeal, you get me a donut! I was like, you don't have arms, stomach. Stop trying to threaten to punch me, because my stomach would threaten to punch me all the time. Anyway, I kept talking to people about how I would go back to the gym, and it hurt, and they were like, oh, you know when you lose weight, this will happen. And I just kept having these weird dialogues with strangers, mostly strangers, or acquaintances that were like, when you lose weight, magic sprinkles will fly out of your butt. All these strange things, so I wrote a list of all the things people would say would happen when you lose, magically, when you lose weight, which I thought were absurd, and then, anyway, and then I wrote this poem. It's called Thin I Thin. When I lose weight, all of my lovers will leave me because they loved the fat boy, holding the skinny boy trapped inside. But fuck them! I'll be thin, damn it! When I lose weight, just think I will spend nothing but all my days posting pictures all over Facebook of me doing things the right way. Thin. When I lose weight, my mother will finally stop worrying about me. She'll take down all the fat pictures of me off of the fridge, call all of her friends, tell them she finally has her son back. When I lose weight, I'll be one of those people that willingly goes to parks. I'll say, yeah, I want to go to the park, yeah, I want to go to the beach, I will totally go to your pool party. You know what? I should take my shirt off. It is pretty hot now. I'm not afraid. I'm thin now. Bath houses, here I come. Sex clubs, watch out! I'll do it. Nude beaches, nude modeling, nude parties. I'll do it! Nude! Nude, nude, nude, nude, nude! Nude, baby. I'll take my clothes off every time I perform. My art will be me doing random things naked. I'll take needles, and I will move them from one pile of needles to another pile of needles. It'll be art, and it'll be interesting, because I'll be thin and naked and thin, thin. Think of all the parties I'll get invited to. My friends will all be tiny, skinny, white, gay men, and we will stand together at the thin, gay, fairy, queer, radical, vegan, gathering slash, sex party slash, dance party slash, craft making thin, paw, luck, occupy, thin, movement. People won't be able to tell which one is me and neither will I thin, I think. When I have sex, I won't know what to do with all that space between my neck and my legs. I'll finally let men touch my stomach. I'll keep the lights on one night after fucking all the thin men thin, and all the thin men are sleeping on my bed. There's a lot of them, but they fit because they're so thin. I'll sit with my knees folded to my chest and my arms around them, perplexed and in awe that I'm sitting in a position that I've never been able to sit in in my life with my knees to my chest and my arms around them. I'll look out the window, waiting for the skinny sun to rise, and as it rises, it'll come through my window because it's so skinny and the sun will float over to my skinny ear and finally, finally whisper all the secrets of life that it only whispers to skinny people at thin dawn. Thank you. So I do have like a poetry manuscript and you know, I'm trying to seduce everybody into writing it. I mean to reading it. If anybody knows Dave Eggers, I will give him a lap dance. I will sit on that lap. I will put my fingers through that curly hair. But the current title is a heartbreaking weightness of being a Mexican queer immigrant. It's really long I know. I'm going to change it. I'm just going to read you one tiny page from it. The only thing you need to know is that I work at a sex club, one of the oldest sex clubs in the city. It's very fun. Sometimes it's not. Lots of older gentlemen come into the club but also truckers, good looking truckers, some of them old, some of them young, some of them good old boy looking daddies, tall husky bearded men with trucker hats, heavy meaty hands that look like everyone's backyard uncle fresh out of the garage with salt and pepper beards. One guy looks like Santa Claus if Santa Claus was a cage fighter or lived in a trailer park with some muscles coming out of a sleeveless flannel shirt, orange and gray colors, faded worn jeans every time he comes in. He has a big smile and rosy cheeks. So I started to call him Roughneck Santa Claus. Let's call him that. Roughneck Santa Claus was really nice to me when he came to the co-check the first time and asked for a basket. At the co-check you get a hanger or you can leave a bag with us or you get a basket to pull all your clothes in so you can go in and start fucking. Some men do that. They get completely naked except for their shoes. That is one of the rules of the club. You have to go in with your shoes on, no bare feet, no flip flops. This ain't a bath house. So he asks for a basket and puts most of his things in it, keeping his jeans on and puts everything in there, even his wallet. But then I see that he has a little black bag and I go, you're not going to check that in. And he goes, not yet. It was a little black mysterious overnight bag. Could have been filled with toothbrush, razors, shaving cream. He goes, I'm checking it in in a moment and walks away into the bathroom. And in about 15 minutes he comes back with his jeans completely open in the front. They were being held up with some suspenders. And there, flopping out of his jeans was this ginormous glowing cock. It was sticking right out, fully erect. It looked odd, swollen and gooey. He had this huge smile on his face like he had just accomplished a great big achievement. He checked his little black overnight bag in with the rest of his stuff and gestured down to his enormous erection, said gleefully, the miracles of modern science. I finally understood what was in the bag, some sort of erection enhancing device or drugs. He kept smiling at me though and like wouldn't leave. And he kept smiling. I guess waiting for me to say something, he looked at me then down at his cock, then looked at me then down at his cock. Did he want me to compliment him on his erection? He did look pretty proud of it. They don't fucking pay me enough for this shit, I thought to myself. But he seemed so happy and excited all I could muster was, well hey, look at that. Go get him, tiger. He laughed, a rough neck Santa Claus laugh, but then stopped. Got very serious, leaned in and said, never take your erections for granted, young man. And walked away into the depths of the club. I looked down at my crotch and thought about all the erections I've had in my life without being grateful for them. Thank you. That's from the novel, the nonfiction, noncreative, whatever you call it, creative nonfiction novel. I wanted to call it lies, but there's already a creative nonfiction novel out there called Live, so I was like, damn it. Anyway, so real quick before I do my last piece, this Saturday if you're free and you like free stuff, Beast Crawl's happening in Oakland. It's a giant literary crawl, just like Lit Crawl, but in Oakland. And I curated one of the first time slots called Sexy Beasts. I've gathered the writers that really excite me right now, so we have Denise Jolly, who else? Allison Moon, the novelist, just joined our ranks. She writes lesbian werewolf novels, people. Come on, you gotta come just to see her. Lauren Wheeler is an amazing writer, slam poet. Jasmine Shlofki from the Santa Cruz area. And then my last one is Marissa Thompson. They're all really incredible writers. I'm not reading, I'm hosting, but if you come, I'll give you a big hug and you'll listen to all this awesome stuff. It's at the Flight Deck five o'clock free, Oakland. Yay, Beast Crawl. Last Sunday was Frida Kahlo's birthday. And yeah, for like 10 years, I tried not to write about Frida because everybody was so obsessed with her. And I'm from Mexico, and a lot of people don't know that. In Mexico, for the longest time, people have really hated Frida Kahlo. It's really weird. All of my relatives grew up kind of like badmouthing her. And then my mom secretly on the side was like, she's really talented, fuck them. They're just slut shaming her. My mother would give me these books full of her art and her and I would talk about it because in Mexico it was weird. People were like, no, Diego Rivera was an artist. Frida Kahlo was a star fucker. I was like, no, she was actually a radical feminist socialist. Anyway, so I finally started writing about her a lot because fuck it, why not? This is called Famous Inspirational Quotes that Frida Kahlo may not have said. I hope that in the future, white women will put my face on t-shirts and make money with them. Because I kind of do like capitalism. It's like not even that bad, y'all. Frida Kahlo. In the future, if I play my cards right, people will make quilts with my face and some sugar skulls on it. That totally says badass radical socialist to me. Frida Kahlo. Man, I hope that someday in the future, people will say that there is no more appropriate way to celebrate my beautiful work and fascinating life as a feminist icon and painter than with these unique handcrafted wearable art pieces. Frida Kahlo. I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damn things learned how to swim. May they live on, hand-painted, onto decorative pencil skirts that come in all sizes, Frida Kahlo. I don't paint my dreams, I paint my own reality, which I hope one day lives on forever in sock form. And just when people feel that socks are not enough, may my reality be represented and knee-high stockings so that my unique look can help people feel sexy when they wear socks with my face on them. But anyway, people, it's the 1930s, and Mexico, who wants to do the Charleston and get some enchiladas? Frida Kahlo. God, I hope my picture hangs in Mexican taquerias all over the U.S. someday. Oh, I better catch my bus. Okay, somebody got that. Dude, I hope someone someday captures the rebellious courage with which I explored the vast spectrum of my sexuality in a time when it was considered horrifically obscene and unheard of in my country, especially for a woman, by painting my face on a durable mesh tote bag. A girl can dream. Frida Kahlo. May all of my deep-sensual connections that I make with my several lovers live on in the future, within the poetry written by privileged capitalists upper-middle-class millennials who have never traveled to Mexico, but they will get me. Can I go do some shots with my Bu Trotsky? He's so crazy. Art aside, fucking and eating aside, I hope that the future artists actually do cause some change. In my broken small heart, I see a vision of artists that have broken away from religion and capitalist greed that keep themselves from getting lost and senseless anarchy, which is for foolish trust fund babies to get back at their parents. No, I see a world in which artists through education and love truly ignite intellectual discourse that sets about a movement to a more peaceful socialist planet run by the people for the people. I hope that they don't get lost in comfort and useless causes fighting amongst themselves like idiots bullying each other on blogs and screaming matches that lead to nowhere. There are so many people in the world. There must be other people in this future world that think this way. I would imagine that they must be out there thinking this way too. I hope they find each other and actually do change the world. It would make me very sad to find out that all they do is fight on Facebook, get tired, watch Netflix, and continue to feed the capitalist machine. Anyway, I'm rambling. I'm off to a bar. I need a woman to kiss in a tequila bottle, make love to, watch out, Mexico! Here I come! Hashtag Mi Vida Loka, Free the Colour. Thank you guys! Oh my God, Bruce Fernandez! That was amazing! Thank you!