 Good evening. Happy fiesta. I see some of us are addressed for the fiesta occasion. This is a week of celebration and we're celebrating here at the Central Library with a very special guest who will be introduced very soon. First of all, let me introduce myself. I'm Ramiro Salazar, Director of the San Antonio Public Library. I want to extend to all of you a very warm welcome. As I indicated earlier, we have a wonderful program and we're excited to be presenting a very special guest and presenter. Before I continue, let me see if I have any board members that are here that I need to recognize. I don't see anyone. Okay. I do want to thank Nowcast and the leadership of Nowcast for live streaming this particular presentation. Charlie Rand, thank you so much for your support and all you do to empower the community with not only information but the experiences that you share through your service. Thank you so much for what you do. April is not only fiesta, part of fiesta, but it is National Poetry Month and throughout the library system, we're offering the number of programs to celebrate the power of poetry. We're happy this evening to be partnering with the Department for Culture and Creative Development and I'm very pleased and honored to be introducing my colleague and the head and director of the Department for Culture and Creative Development and that's Felix Padron. He'll be coming to the podium very soon. Felix as director of this very special department, you have taken a department to higher levels of excellence and have expanded your influence in the arts which is very important in the city and so I'm grateful for the work that you have done to enlighten the community with experiences in various forms of arts and it is my pleasure at this time to invite Felix to the podium and he will be introducing our special presenter today. Felix. Thank you Ramiro for that wonderful introduction and buenas noches para todos y bienvenido a la biblioteca central de San Antonio. Es un placer. I want to thank you obviously everyone for coming out tonight for this special location and the library thank you thank you thank you thank you for partnering with us for the special presentation tonight. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the wonderful guests that we have here very special individual but first I want to give you a little bit of background on perhaps how we got here. Many of you may know that in 2012 in the year 2012 San Antonio became the first major city major city in Texas to appoint a port laureate and since then other cities have followed including the city of Houston they sort of got the bug and understood the power of having a port laureate and how transformational that could be and then a smaller city but equally important as the city of McAllen which is actually doing some pretty phenomenal stuff in the valley they have appointed their own port laureates so that's really amazing that we have been able to sort of set that stage. We then in 2012 obviously we did appoint Dr. Carmen Tafoya as the first port laureate for San Antonio. It was a wonderful to see how she was able to really take on the helm of that appointment for her two-year period and really did a remarkable job in transforming really the thinking about what we do, what we breathe, what we read in this community especially with the young people she was able to do over a hundred sort of presentations engaged in this community in that conversation. In San Antonio obviously we do recognize that poetry plays a significant role in the culture of our day-to-day lives and education and how we shape our population to really inform and really support the sort of the brand that has been anointed to the city which is a city on the rise and I think this is very much a part of that movement. Having a port laureate brings to the forefront the necessity to promote literacy, poetic arts and literature and I think it goes even more beyond that. Our port laureate will foster this message throughout her two-year term which I want to do soon a minute. Just a few weeks ago our department had the pleasure of kicking off National Poetry Month with the appointment of our well-deserved and treasure second poet laureate Lory Ann Guerrero. Lory many of you may know was raised in the south side of San Antonio, yes. She attended McCollum High School and at the age of the tender age of 16 she had her first publication, pretty remarkable. While attending Palo Alto College her composition professor Linda Harris recognized Lory Ann's talent and encouraged her to apply to Smith College. She was accepted as a non-traditional student, I think that's pretty special, non-traditional student. I love that term. And by then she was already actually a wife and a mother of three children. Needless to say she preserved and sacrificed to pursue her dreams of writing and calling, she recognized at a very, very young age. She went to graduate from Smith College with a degree in English language and literature and then received her MFA in poetry from Drew University. In 2012 she won the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize for her first length collection, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dianne, which plenty of books, please buy them and she'll be reciting from that book in a little bit. The book was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2013. The author, Martin Espada said this of Lory Ann's writing, Guerrero writes in a language of el cuerpo, the body, visceral, almost arbitrarily vivid, vivo, the language of a poet who knows how to work her hands. Pretty remarkable, digging deep down in the soul. Lory Ann believes that reading and writing lead to the awareness of oneself and when we are aware that our voices have the ability to affect even the smallest change we can become willing to strengthen them and share them. It is this reality that empowers our communities to seek higher education and to uncover untold stories. That's the basis of her poetry at this time. Since turning to San Antonio in 2008, or returning to San Antonio in that year, 2008, Lory Ann has taught at Gemini Eng, Palo Alto and the University of Incarnate Word. She has also been a visiting writer at UT El Paso and our lady of the Lake University. She has taken this year to finish her book tour and work on her net collection, A Crown of Gumen Cindo, which will be published, I think, pretty soon, ready to get published. So it will be pretty amazing. Looking forward to them. I will close with a quote from El Alcalde, Julian Castro, following in the footsteps of Carmen Tefoya will not be easy, but Lory Ann Guerrero is an inspiring choice who will amplify the importance of literary arts in San Antonio. Her personal story and professional success will resonate with muchos San Antonians. We look forward to the next two years as Lory Ann carries on this literary tradition in San Antonio that began last two years ago. We want you all to stay involved with the great ideas and events to come. It takes a community to make this work and thank you all for being here and supporting not only poetry, but also supporting Lory Ann Guerrero. Con eso quiero introducir la poeta Lory Ann Guerrero. Bienvenido. Thank you all. Thank you all for being here. I'm really happy to add this thing is in my face. Can y'all hear me like this? Is this okay? There. I'm really happy to be here. It's my first reading as Poet Laureate of my city. It's an honor. It's an honor and it's unbelievable. I just did an interview with Texas Poetry Review, Borderlands, that's supposed to come out in June. And my interviewer asked me what does it feel like? What does this feel like? And no one had actually asked me that, so it wasn't until I had this question and I had to write an answer that I really thought about it. And you know to be someone who, you know, the only girl of my family, the youngest, I was constantly seeking a space from which to speak. I wanted to be listened to. So to be in this space now, it's kind of what you wish for. But I've spent a lot of time, this is what I was telling the interviewer, I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror and reminding myself that this is what a poet looks like. This is what a strong woman looks like. This is how we do what we do. We just work hard and we be ourselves and we keep on fighting. Keep on fighting. So again, I'm really, really honored to be here. I want to thank the San Antonio Public Library, which has been a lifesaver for me, my entire life. The Department of Cultural and Creative Development for the support and Joel, I don't know if he's here. I wanted to say too that, you know, poetry is such an important thing and it's important when we, you know, as an educator and as a mother, especially I try to get my students and my children to understand that when we're reading poetry, it allows us to access parts of ourselves that we wouldn't normally, things we wouldn't normally think of or maybe things we're afraid to say. And so in doing that, there's an empowerment that happens that allows us to sort of walk through the world with confidence and makes us able to speak up for ourselves and for others and make change. And when you're writing poetry, it allows for this exploration of the self. And it's in those moments when we're writing poetry that we're really able to acknowledge the things that we already know. And I think certainly in communities like the one I grew up, I grew up in the South Side, an underserved community, I think we were constantly striving to be better, do more, get out of that community. And the reality is it's only because we had never really acknowledged what we already have. The smartest man I know was my grandfather, he had a third grade education. And so to acknowledge that, I think it's really important that we do that for ourselves and for our ancestors and for our children. But I'm going to read to you from my book. It's for sale, please buy some. I keep it real, I'm a poet. I'm going to start with the first poem of the book, it's called Preparing the Tongue. In my hands, it's cold and knowing as bone, shrouded in plastic, I unwind its gauze mummy like, rub my wrist blue against the cactus of its buds. Were it still cradled inside the clammy cow mouth, I should want to enchant it, let it taste the oil in my skin, lick the lash of my eye. What I do instead is lacerate the frozen muscle, tear the brick, thick, cudd conductor and half to fit a ceramic red pot. Its cry reaches me from some heap of butchered heads as I hack away like an axe murderer. I choke down the stink of its heated moo, make carnage of my own mouth add garlic. This next poem, this next poem is called Sundays after breakfast, a lesson in speech. There were no names for men like that. Gringos who stitched up their rules, their white garb, lace snug the issues of the day. Lord didn't make us to mix with them folk, they said. But God's got nothing to do with the black boys jump still alive into a restless river. God's got nothing to do with having to tell their mamas. That bloody water ran through each dark vein across Texas, fed the gulf, all its brown skinned people. This grandpa could name Los Cuerpos, body swaying above the cotton like sheets on a line. No importaba que no eres negro, pero que no eres gringo. No, it didn't matter that you weren't black, grandpa says pushing himself from the table. But that you weren't white. He lived his life this way, silent like every man after him, opening his mouth only to eat, holding his head above the cotton between white men and black boys. This one's called roosters home coming. They're roosters. She corrects me. Chubby Cox hang above our head from the ruffle of curtain in the room where her children eat in her kitchen next door to the house where I used to live. She laughs and two step pups a couple of those equis con Lima. I've missed you neighbor I say peering through her window into the kitchen I used to cook in next door looking for the painting I left behind the curtains I sewed looking to see if I damaged the counters with an imprint of my ass wondering if my DNA might show up if detectives ever needed samples is my hair wound tightly in that carpet skin flakes painted into that red door neighbor tells me the new woman next door has a baby that cries all night. And when the man struts home at four in the morning, he crows like a madman. Our beer is ceremony. We talk about Maria. Remember her? Her baby Lewis. Did you know she was pregnant when he killed her? That he killed the baby first? The boy first in front of her? Our children rush through the kitchen paletas and hand to the backyard with the men who love us today. Passing the salt con limon we pray for the woman next door hoping blood is never never shed in my old home like in Maria's two blocks down. Neighbor loves her curtains. Come back. She says. Come back. And when you do, I'll bring you Caldo the way I did when you were expecting la chiquita before you moved to the snow where roosters are thin and don't know how to dance. So one of the things that I explore in my book, you know, when I was writing or revising a lot of this book, I was living in Massachusetts. I moved there when I was 27. I graduated from Smith when I was 30. In those three years I was finishing up this book. I shouldn't say I was working on this book. And there were so many things happening in my city and I started to feel like I needed to get home because I'm superwoman and I can save everybody. I'm going to read this book. It's called Esperanza Tells Her Friends The Story of La Llorona. She killed her babies in the river over there by the Bill Miller barbecue place. You know by the Holy Mother Church, she was friends with my grandma. They played bingo together, I think. Oh yeah? Why'd she kill them? They were brats and they were probably never helped her clean the house and they're probably really whiny and always wanted candy and line at the H.E.B. Had she do it, Espe? She drowned them one at a time and herself too, I think. That's probably why she cries. She probably didn't mean to kill herself too. That's not how the story goes. My mom said it happened in Mexico and not San Antonio. Shut up, Patty. What do you know? Your mom's not even Mexican like us. Anyway, I think she reincarnates herself. Or maybe God doesn't want her in heaven because she's crazy and she killed her own babies, but she keeps coming back. Whatever, Espe. Serious. She comes back in real life and keeps on killing her babies, but I don't think she cries anymore. She's so used to it now. She's gone to Houston, had snokes, to Plano, even back to San Antonio right here in the south side. You think you know everything? Tell us how come sometimes she kills herself and sometimes she don't. I don't know. Maybe she cloned herself and now there's lots of yoronas. Maybe someone you know, Patty, maybe your mother. I love reading that one. Thank you. This one's called Ode to El Cabrito. I think most people know what Cabrito is. Maybe called we eat it at Don Pedro Sien. Ode to El Cabrito. More than sheep and cow and butterfly, I love you. No envy between us like the rooster footed. In your belly, I live like warm milk, goat thick and cloud heavy, lick you from the inside until the slaughter when your mother cries like my mother. When fire sends its last breath to the stars, I tear away your muscle, bubbling fat and warm tortillas over coal. In the onion and cilantro, you do not recoil like the burnt skin of the pig, but spread yourself, sunbather. The rest of you still on the spit, gap-mouthed, your fleshless head tossed back. You love being loved. In the sweet meat of you, little hooved, little horned, I taste my own skin. This one's called Stray Cat. She was fat, round as the moon and just as gray. She didn't have time for hiding, for safety, for hissing away on lookers. Her legs jerked and out rolled the little slick and warm bundles too. She circled them, inspected the mousy ears, licked the furlous pink skin. They made no noise. Their tiny hearts rippled though softly. She ate one, then she ate the other. So I thought I had marked here. Yeah, I'm gonna read this one. Yeah, okay. So yeah, one of the things that I was dealing with when I was living far away was my mother sends, calls me and sends, starts sending me clippings from the from the Express News about the babies that were found under a house in the south side. And maybe because I was postpartum, I don't know, but it really it took a toll on me. And so I have these two poems that I'm gonna read to you from that experience. The first one is called Babies Under the House for Saraya and Sebastian. When you open your eyes again, Saraya, this will just be one of those things like rice and bean tacos every night, having to go to the free clinic, buying gas with food stamps at Ben's ice house at the corner of Pleasanton in Petaluma. But you know that, don't you know that your body will never grow completely? When you open your eyes, your skin will be smooth as a day you were born, not what it was when they found you and the tiny thing that was your brother. The dirt around you will have licked away mother's milk from your lips. Absorb the sour scent of mother's breath on your neck, the iron heavy taste of blood in your mouth. You won't even remember. When you open your eyes again, Saraya, you will be the mother. Your tart Mexican heart won't let you be anything else. No need for grownups, child protective services who are too busy, the legislators who couldn't give medication, education to this poor neighborhood, this city, la raza with no muscle, no voice, hope decomposing in a couple of plastic bags. But there are two things you will have that your mother never did. A whole Saraya, a whole Sebastian. So when this was happening, this fear of violence that I grew up around, I guess when I became a mother, it really started infiltrating my psyche and my dreams. And there are many poems that I write that are straight from my dreams. I kept dreaming that I was going to die. And this one day I woke up and I sort of rolled out of bed and wrote down the dream word for word. And I revised my poems, you know, 20, 15 times. This one got very, very little revision because it was just, it was straight out. This one's called Morning Praise of Nightmares. When the steak knife fiddled against the sinew of my gut, I heard the slow wine. Felt each ridge. Felt the simmering red erupt like the juice of an overripe plum, the tickle of nectar running down the body still warm from the sun. And from the kitchen to the street fair, as it often is in dreams, children laughing, a clown, the color yellow, balloons melting against the burned sugar of the skin. And guns, tiny, like from gumball machines in tiny hands, bullets red and green and gunmetal blue piercing the skin like botflies, their metal heads in deep until that offspring, that winged blood gently and timidly took flight. Then the peeling of my skin. Who was that crafter whose face I never saw? The paper maker, his teacup hands, his close pin fingers, rinsing clean the lace of my forearms. The squared off torso, long sheet of leg, thick bit of finger and toe like strips of bacon, strung up, decorating that red room like black and white photos developing mountains or smiles or sacks. I could taste my own blood, though I couldn't lift my hands to finish the job, put myself out of misery. I was butt remains, a piled heap of slop on the floor of a house I never shared a meal in. Even my eyelids were gone and my spine exposed. I was an afterbirth without the birthing, a too early puppy whose whole pink body thumped with each beat of his slow heart. This is my morning praise of nightmares. Open your eyes. I hear three mouths whisper against the flower of my skull. Mama, open your eyes. Sundays after breakfast, a lesson in cotton picking. South Texas 1943. It was a kind of dance. Feet shuffling in dust, fluttering hands like birds nest building. Blood staining brown birds red. Cotton sacks 12 feet long dragging behind like a tongue fat and slow as son. I watch him slow weep of his eye remembering the girl who'd name and nurse nine children. He picks my grandma by the color of her dress, her eyes. And because she's lucky, not by how much cotton she can pick. So how are we doing on time? Anybody? I think I'm going to read two more from here. This one's called put attention. Put attention, grandma would say, as if attention were a packet of salt to be sprinkled or a mound we could scoop out of a carton like ice cream. Put attention, put attention, put it where in her hands in the percolator on top of the television set that seeps fat red lips and Mexican moustaches. Next to the jade bura between la virgen and cousin cousin Pablo's sixth grade class photo, marshmallow teeth jumping out of his mouth. We never corrected her. Like the breast Spanish lulled grandma's tongue as we threw down shards of English laughing for her to leap in and around. Put attention, put attention, put it where? Shall I put attention in my glass and drink it soft like Montepulchiano de Abruzzo? Like Shinerback? Orchata? Put attention. Ponga atención she tried to say in our language. Put attention somewhere large. Back into her eyes. In the part of her brain that doesn't remember her own daughters. How to make rice. Translate instructions. Don't take the baby out of here. Y'all keep the baby in here. Do I need to? Okay, can y'all? Oh, that's better, right? Oh, I got to do all first. Okay, that sounds really loud. This is better. Okay, sorry. This next poem is called, I get to tell the story of this poem. It's called wooden box. My grandfather when I got back from Massachusetts, he asked me, he called me Piyuya. Piyuya, what do you want? And I wanted him to take the the reclaim the lumber that he'd been storing in his shed and make me a dining table with it. He couldn't understand why I wanted this, but that's what I wanted. And he said, Okay, well, start pulling that lumber down, and we're going to make a table. So we started doing that. And I got in his way. So he sent me out. And I went to go get him a glass of water. When I got back into the workshop, he was kind of sitting on a sitting on a bar stool, and he was kind of slumped over. I said, grandpa, what's going on? You know, he looked sad. And he said, you know, I'm over here making you this table. I should just build myself a coffin. This one's called a wooden box. He demands this. Nothing else. No mahogany slick or roses kissed by lilies, no music or speech weeping limited. We are to file down the aisle, not head to his dead body, return home to care for things still living. We are not to sob for the child him, the bed and alphabetless picker of cotton, potatoes, tomatoes, follower of crops. We are not to sob for the cactus man vaquero lover him. Grandpa who takes his milk from the moon, who knows the time for cookie, the time for wine. No. When he is gone, he will be gone. I can make the box myself. He says, I can make it myself. I used to cry through that one. I don't anymore. I'm getting better. I'm going to read this last poem from the book. And then I'd like to share some new work if that's okay with everybody. My grandfather was blind. And this one's called on blinding. When finally, the shadows grow like cactus, scraping the iris gray as the sea and I no longer see the articulation of a bird's wing, or the curve of my own magnificent knee. When finally, the nerve behind that bulbous white that tickle of brown forgets its job, loses its mind to time, erupting hot and slow as magma. Know that I know the magic of the blind. I have catalogued your hands in my hands. So thank you. I am working on new poems about my grandfather. I last him in July. It's been almost, oh, it's been nine months yesterday. So the book that I'm working on is called A Crown for Gumesindo and it's a crown of sonnets, which is a series of 15 sonnets. So the last line of the first sonnet begins the second sonnet and the last line begins the third and so on and it forms a wreath or a crown. I'm only going to read three from the crown. It's not finished yet, but it's almost finished. I'm going to read you number seven, number eight and number 11. Number seven, newborns. I can't see. It's better. Newborns. Let's look at our reflection in the mud. See how in four months each of us has changed. What is your name without a body? My name without you here. I am new. What I never was. Suddenly I carry my newborn grief like a new mother nursing and swaddling my most fragile, my newest, my sweet. What festers in the bellies of strangers does not concern me. There is only this. I am the only mother. Mine is the only child. I decompose alongside you, wanting and not wanting everyone to see off balance and leaking my skin and strands. The oddity that was put in my hands. Number eight, Dia de los Muertos. The oddity that was put in my hands, your truck. It used to be I drove this road each week to pick you up. Now I drive this road each week to lay you down again. Today is the day of the dead. When did you die? Today I bring you chicharron con huevo, chile, which is to say I bought breakfast to the goats. I want to slip my hand into the photo of you, fix your hair as I did, help you with your sweater, guide the salt to your plate. The grass is starting to grow over you. Shards of rock gone smooth. I sing to the bees. I lay my ear to stone. It doesn't hurt. I hear your voice rising from the dirt. And this will be the last one. It's called casketing. It's number 11 of the 15. Cascading is another dream poem. Oh, I can't see it. Cascading. I've buried everything I've ever loved in the bone of reason. Now, even in sleep, you are dead. Sometimes in your metal colored coffin, I will you to the grocery store. Once to a papery. Twice to fiesta bakery on Pleasanton. You are heavy. Once I was in high school in a play and parked you stage left. Always I shake you. Wake up. Damn you. Sometimes the casket is open. And I kick you. And when in my small shoes, I make contact your ribs crumble like the bark of an old Mesquite. Wake up. Wake up. We cannot run the numbers. Argue. Make your mother's bread. If you are always going to be dead. Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. I really appreciate it. Carrie Moxigimba. And on behalf of the San Antonio Public Library, I'd like to thank Lori for attending today and all of you for coming. We also have a copy of her book, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, that is going to permanently be a part of our Latino collection. We are going to have her autograph it right here today so that it will go upstairs and be here forever. Thank you so much.