 Hello and welcome, everyone. Thanks all for coming. I'm John Smalley, librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. While we're waiting for everyone to join us, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge our community, to tell you about a few upcoming programs and to inform you about some vaccination resources. On behalf of the Public Library, we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and to acknowledge the many Romitush Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside and work. Our libraries committed to the names of these families and community members, and we encourage you to learn more about First Person Rights. On Tuesday, May 18th, authors Mia Manonsala and Gigi Pandion will discuss the art of mystery writing and publishing. The following day on May 19th, the philosopher Lewis Gordon discusses his latest book, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. On May 20th, the total San Francisco Book Club hosts a conversation with author, Alia Volts, about her new book, Homebaked, My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco. On May 23rd, the virtuoso Japanese Kodo player, Shoko Hikage, will perform an entrancing concert of traditional and contemporary music for Kodo. On May 24th, the author, Vanessa Huah, discusses A River of Stars, her powerful debut novel about motherhood, migration, and identity. And on May 25th, author Andrea Lo discusses her new book, Chinatown Pretty, Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown's Most Stylish Seniors. On May 26th, San Francisco's poet, Laurel Tongo Eisenmarten comes back again and brings together poets from Mississippi for an evening of powerful poetry and resistance. On May 27th, the remarkable poet and translator, Clara Sue, will present a program of contemporary and classic Chinese poetry. This will be bilingual in Cantonese and Clara's English translations. She'll be accompanied by Gujone master, David Wong. Looking ahead to next month, Tongo Eisenmarten will be facilitating a conversation between authors Marlon Peterson and Kisei Lamont, who will be discussing Peterson's new book, Bird Uncaged, an abolitionist freedom song. I'm sure you have all heard about SFPL to go, that's the library's curbside service. You can place items on hold over the computer or over the telephone, then come to the library to pick those up. Later this week on May 17th and 18th, two of our branch libraries will be reopening Chinatown and Mission Bay. And right now the first and second floor of the main library are open seven days a week. So come visit us. If you live in San Francisco, you can sign up to get notified when you're eligible for vaccination. These are two websites that will tell you where is the closest place to where you live to get vaccinated. And that's all I have for announcements. I'd now like to turn the microphone over to our beloved poet, Kim Shuck. Please give a warm welcome to Kim. Thanks, John. I was just looking at the room my neighbor has tuned in, which is very exciting to me. Also, I don't know that she's ever heard me do my thing before. And also I saw a last name that looks really familiar, which is Vangian, my great grandmother's last name was Vangian. Welcome everybody, thank you for being here. Just wanna take one second at the top of the show to think about, we lost a poet, this pretty recently, Richard Sandorell who a lot of the poets in the city know and who used to be a regular attendee at Poem Jam Live. So if you hadn't heard that, that's true. And he will be sorely missed. Tonight's show is basically inspired by the fact that a rumor was going around that Tonko and I were not getting along or that I was unhappy that he was the laureate. And I encourage you to go look at the very end of my inaugural speech in which I said that I fully expected to at some point listen to Tonko Eisenmarten, do what I was doing then, which was be inaugurated as the poet laureate of San Francisco. I am delighted, could not be more delighted. And we thought about staging an argument, but I think the giggling would be too big a problem. So instead we decided to organize poetry fitting together because that's what I do pretty much for any stimulus that exists. And I just, I'm really delighted that the city's poetry is in the hands of an activist in a visionary. I fully expected when I got inaugurated to end up as a tricky trivia question about his early career and I have succeeded in that goal. We have four incredible poets for you tonight. We always have great poets because there are so many great poets in the San Francisco Bay Area and farther afield when we draw them from there. But I'm really excited about who we have reading tonight. And our first poet is Jesse-Louise Alderete, who is one of my very favorite poets. The first time I ever heard him read, he was reading something funny. And I got to that point of laughing where I couldn't draw breath. He can inspire lots of different emotions. I don't know which one he's bringing tonight, but they're all pretty serious, a very, very intense poet. Jesse-Louise Alderete, good friend, great poet. Gracias, Kim. Buenas noches, familia. It's good to see all your little square heads in the zoom mundo. It's nice, it's nice. Yeah, I'm gonna be reading for my new libro recently put out by Black Friday Press. And Laura, she just showed me her book and I realized something. If your head is small enough, you can use me as a mask and walk around and do things, but that's entirely up to your head size. I don't know. I think I'm gonna get up and read for y'all standing up like we did back in the old days. Sorry, Bulano, it's time for you to move. We're gonna do it. Oh God. We're saying some poets have not read for at least a year in the zoom mundo. This is how we did it back in the old days, gente. We stood. Yeah, poets in the zoom mundo now, they don't even wear pants. Some of them be eating noodles while they read. No, not today, not today. Okay, do a little bit of a, I'm feeling a little nostalgic. So I think what we're gonna do is to start with a little bit of some punctual memories. But first an introduction. First off, mi gente, let me say that the speedy tools that I end up talking to do not have high speed internet access or the keys to the church. The speedy tools that I end up talking to, they got folk tales from Brawley about the devil. They have umbilical accordion conexiones to el cielo over in San Luis Potosí and VHS Huesos buried out in the dirt somewhere in Reynosa. And when we get to cotorriando, well, it feels like an abuelitas kitchen table filled with comadres up in here, San Pancho memories. Memories. In a tiny apartment above the old el Sinaloa nightclub, in the neighborhood in San Francisco, or I should say, San Pancho, that used to be called Little Mexico, but it's now called North Beach. Mi mamá and mi tía lucha, also known as la Norteñita, knew exactly what they were doing when they broke in English to the rent check on the first of every month. Mi tía, la Norteñita, she sang canciones rancheras, and mi mamá waited tables downstairs in the club on most nights, while the fog drifted across Vallejo Street and disappeared down Broadway. The beginning of their North American sueños. And now I remember mi mamá in the 70s stucco duplex, black waitress apron hanging over the doorknob of the bedroom closet. She was downstairs, hanging the Christmas decorations upside down and backwards so that Noel sort of said, Leon. Later on that night, after my mamá went to work her second job, I would sometimes be comforted by tin foil wrapped hamburguesas and cold papas fritas brought to me by mi padre's esqueleto. The esqueleto would still be wearing his high-waisted red waiter jacket from Westlake Joe's. His huesos always stayed with me whenever his brown skin went off to score some coke or make a last minute bet on a horse named Doonesbury. His huesos would stay there with his galaca illuminated in the dark by the gray, a-soul glow of the TV as he laughed and laughed to reruns of Samford and some with me. Inside La Rondalla, it was always tin foil colored Christmas decorations and smiling two gorlos and one flaco trios serenading the customers. While unbeknownst to most of them, outside and to the left of La Rondalla's front door was the last known payphone in San Francisco, or I should say, San Pancho, that would take callbacks. Needless to say, this telefono was a Mission Street dealer in Junkie's Milagro, man. In the 70s, mi padre used to do his coke deals on that phone and a couple of decades later, I'm doing my business on it, hitting pound 9-1-1, pound 9-1-1. And a quick callback tells me, ya, ya, gamos. Soon enough, a van appears with three yucatecos inside, all named Miguel, colored balloons achievin' their mouths. And it went like that, one time. It was 3 a.m. And I was makin' me call on the payphone when all of a sudden a weathered wooden statue of San Pancho, just like the kind you might find in the name of a church out in the desierto somewhere, came floating right down the middle of Valencia Street, man, just like a veterano's round flag cruising low and slow, and I was the only one around to see it. That statue had deep cracks in its wood that looked like wrinkles on a viejito's brown face, and the colores of its robe had faded from all its wanderings. Well, that statue was still sagrado, ilagroso, divino, hung up the phone, and lowered my eyes at the San Pancho Santo floating past me, drifting past places on Valencia Street that are not there anymore. Chinga tu madre blues, the American version. Cuando mi gente, you start to sing the chinga tu madre blues, I gotta ask, is it our legacy to work the jobs that Americanos don't want and still get blamed for stealing them? Is it our legacy to repeat the same mistakes que our abuelos and abuelas made but in a different time and place? Is it our legacy to sing along the karaoke versions of narco colidos? Is it our legacy to chew these funny tasting palabras americanas for the rest of our lives? When do I hear the chinga tu madre blues playing on the radio, I gotta ask? Is it our legacy to live inside piñatas that are dangling off the power lines alongside the triste sneakers above our old neighborhoods? Is it our legacy to never quite let go of the bottom rung of the ladder to hold on con dos manos in one lifetime? Is it our legacy to wash cars, to wash dishes, to wash other people's children until the final quinto sol terremotos? Is it our legacy to not be recognized by our own familia in an American dream? Is it our legacy to only be able to visit our familias in an American dream? Is it our legacy that our gente will end up praying to Santo Juniper Sarah Ijole, man? When do I sing the chinga tu madre blues written in our blood? I gotta ask. Is it our legacy to watch the telenovelas and laugh along with the laugh track but not really know what's going on? Is it our legacy to only chew miracles during the commercials and only smoke the cigarros that will kill us? Is it our legacy to border a border and cross a line all at the same time? When do los tigres del norte do their cover of the chinga tu madre blues? I gotta ask, is it our legacy to wait here forever for Quetzalcoatl to arrive? Is it our legacy to know exactly the momento when we're gonna die but we have to forget all about it while we wait in between the cracks in the law while we wait in Santa Rosa with a toy rifle in our hand while we wait for ice to snatch up another one of our children while we wait at a bus stop in Oakland looking like someone in quotation marks that looks suspicious in a hoodie speaking spanglish? Is it our legacy to run out of days to mourn and places to bury our dead? Is it our legacy that it gets so local here, so xenophobic here, so anti-immigrant here, so racista here that we will have no choice but to go up and ask the big conejo en la luna if it's okay to just be a silhouette up there with him for a while until it all cools down here? Cuando de espíritus of my familia start to sing the chinga tu madre blues to me in my dreams, I gotta ask, is it our legacy to call a tortilla a wrap, to let a hale become a lifetime, to let a cup of champorrado become a ring tone? Is it our legacy to let our abuelas become a meme, to let our murales get covered over by white motivational phrases? Is it our legacy to let a muni bus ride become our vacation, to let a Tuesday mariposa become something that we cannot afford? Is it our legacy to watch them build that pinche wall, that mudo, and then watch them build the longest strip mall in North America right alongside it where we'll do all our grocery shopping? Is it our legacy to live long enough to see a Donald Trump piñata and pregnant a door of the Explorer piñata and give birth to a new white master race? No, is it our legacy that our sueños will become four extra ships a week that our Santos will only hear our prayers if we have the latest iPhone? Is it our legacy to have our almas become a breeze that we only occasionally feel coming in through the window? Is it our legacy to send one Michuacana popsicle stick back home at a time in the mail using them to build the casa of our sueños, the casa that we promised our familia, the casa that we dreamed about, the casa that our huesos will eventually make their way back to even if they get there without skin or anything else? When do I sing the chinga, tu madre blues? I gotta ask, is this our American legacy? Gracias, mi gente. Gracias. Yeah, aquí estamos y nos vamos. So good to be here in the middle of the Kim, Chuck, Tonga, Eisen, Martin poetry feud. I feel I feel in beautiful company and we're gonna get back to the real world very, very soon. Y'all are in for such a treat tonight with the poets. Woo! Right, I love you all. I love you all. I do. Thank you so much, Josiah Louise. Yeah, too much to say anything about. You were all there, you heard what he said. Thank you. Our second reader tonight, we met at a poetry reading in Alameda, weirdly. And that story's been told a lot, so I'm not gonna tell it again, but it involved sour gummy candy and a ride back to San Francisco. Oh, what to say, what to say. She does incredible work in the community and writes her ass off and has been a real lifeline to me as I, in part, have spent the last year turning myself into human veal in my studio writing stuff. So please welcome Lourdes Figueroa. Thank you, Kim, and I'm grateful to be here and it was an incredible reading, Josiah Louise. So I'm just gonna dive in. I think I've only read this poem once and it was written in 2012, but I've been sending it out to the world. So here it goes. It's called Lung Felt Throat. It's a portion of it, so I'll read just a portion of it. I used to believe the body could resuscitate. The lung we filled with used. I was never Mexican enough. My father tried medicine in English, couldn't deflate a bag full of glue. He huffed so much. I shut my eyes so much. I couldn't say the lump in my throat. Spanish wouldn't do, English wouldn't do. Mebolita never remarried. Mebolita Jose dropped his hoe when his heart stopped. I used to believe if I pushed my palms hard enough against the air, the splinters wouldn't hurt. My father picked up the hoe. Mebolita dropped because he loved us. My mom picked up the hoe with my father because she loved us. I went to write all this in single lines because my heart is heavy and we need the space to breathe. I used to hide under my bed. I used to hide my brothers and my sister under our beds when my father hit my mom. They say trauma affects how you perceive things. To not say is to not remember. The body remembers. Mebolita Jose dropped dead, dehydrated. He was making holes for tomato seeds. I don't know Yuba City, California that well. I was born there. Mebolita died in Yuba City. He was a bracero. He had a short handled hoe. Bridges don't break borders when you write everything in language. Today I dislocated my tongue, swallowed the head of a serpent. In Grams, California, my Mebolita Jonah taught me how to kill a rattlesnake. Take your hoe, slice down as fast as you can before it tucks its head in. Splitted tongue, I heard deathbed. I brought my lover. I couldn't spit lesbian. I could not say the lump in my throat. Spanish would not do. My mama used to say how beautiful the Aztecs were. We don't speak now what. Today I lit another candle and prayed to Donan Sin and Yolot held my hand. My father used to cry at night. I would sit by his closed door and listen. They say trauma gives for good writing. They say I'm exotic in Spanish. Every line is affected by the previous line. The tongue forgets the lung remembers. The poem breathes more than this. Memory builds memory. Mebolita Jonah was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. She never drank alcohol. My mama and my papa used to come home drenched in pesticide. My abuelita did too. My papa doesn't know that I heard my papa cry. That his papa Jose hit his mama, Maria, in Carnation Heart. My father does not know that I write these things. I've never said my abuelita's full name until after she died. I learned to spell my abuelita's full name when I read it in the newspaper of Vegetary. My abuelita Jonah is buried in Woodland, California. My abuelita Jose is buried in Huchiglan, Jalisco. I don't know how to cross borders without tripping. I am always rearranging my poems. I'm always rearranging my Spanish. When the memory changes, I'm always rearranging my English when I remember. I don't know what to tell you anymore. The poem ceases to be when you forget your rhythm. Everyone has a history. Every lung has poem. Art doesn't define art. Art is privilege. My voice hasn't changed. It is still here. My skin is brown. My stretch marks are white. My folds are white. Skin is just skin. It's the largest organ in the body. We know this. The body has a long memory. There are many histories. The form of the poem changes when the body remembers differently. El Campesino moves from the tomato fields in Yuba City to the walnut orchards in winters, to the tomato fields in Woodland, to the corn fields in California. Colonization. To penetrate so deep, the tongue tangles. The form of the poem is saliva. Fluid enough to slide the tongue. Spicer says we all speak one poem. We all breathe. Water moves because the wind does, because the earth moves. We all move. El Campesino de Nicaragua crosses Costa Rica's border to work in the coffee mountains of Naranjo. Today I dislocated the brown on my skin, the white of my folds. My father is addicted to huffing. He gets lost every three years. The lung is connected to the line. It inflates like so, deflates like so. My brother called my dad a lacquer head. I don't know how to define this word. He used to lock himself inside his room for days at a time. Door shut long. In the back of the house, I took his warm yellow bag, put it in a paper sack, lit it on fire. The long breathes, exhales, contains the word. The body moves according to the word. The word moves according to the body. I have never been penetrated by a man. A boy penetrated me at five. The memory fogs the eye. The tongue licks the fog. I don't remember his face. To penetrate is to find the most inner so the word can become blood and bleed. Saliva makes things more fluid. Blood stains. When I want the violin tries to cross Mexico's border without papers, she is shot on the spot. Matia threw away my blood stain underwear. I don't know how to diagnose my father. My father was never diagnosed lacquer head. He built three rooms in our house. He didn't sleep for days. He didn't have for six months. My brother Jose came back from boot camp, boarded up all his windows. Jose cleans his nails with bleach. The military gave Jose dishonorable discharge. June Jordan says, some of us did not die. My mother wrote letters to the Pentagon in broken English and cried in Spanish. My mother says, me tumbaron a mijo lucero en pedazos. Jose looks at me and asks me if I am his sister. Spanish won't do. English won't do. When the word cannot be read but felt. Jose talks to me in fragments. My father lives with me in fragments. El campesino isn't remembered. Memory is fragments spliced, respliced. My Spanish is spliced. My English is respliced. In Spain, my professor says I speak a very humble, quiet Spanish. Maulita Chona taught me how to hold a hoe, left hand forward, right arm at the ends, bend like so. Maulita Chona taught me how to carve into the earth, sink in fingers, feed the tomato. In Mexico, my cousins call me a pocha and correct my Spanish. I don't know how to breathe Chicano. It's hard to breathe a slant. In Mexico, they say indio when you say something incorrectly. I don't diagnose poems. I used to believe the body could resuscitate. Before Maulita Chona stopped breathing, she held on tight with her left arm. She trembled when she let go. Her hoe by the screen door. Teneri is to give self, to extend self, to locate each other. To sing is to fill the body. To love is to create, to give. The body filled with shared breath. I don't know how to contemplate my own navel. It is lost between my folds. June Jordan says some of us did not die. June Jordan says she is a descendant of Walt Whitman. We remember in fragments, we learned breath first before we learned tongue muscle. We are descendants of Whitman to Sharon Boyce Lundfeldthroat. Thank you and this is actually, this month is actually the, my grandmother passed away actually 15 years ago. So this is actually the anniversary. I just realized that. But thank you. Grateful to Sharon in poem and that's it. Thank you. You're amazing as always love. Wow. There's a bit of a trick to talking in between people's poetry when they're that eloquent. You got to kind of gather yourself back together. But fortunately, I get to kick it right over to Tango who gets to introduce the next two people. So that works out for me pretty well. Tango Eisen Martin, San Francisco's current and eighth poet laureate taken away. I still want to let it breathe a little bit. But I'll spare you the new age mumbo jumbo. I know we are in the future and the attention spans are hungry. Fun fact, I met Kim. I was introduced to Kim through a woman who helped raise me from a real pup from some cosmic fluke. Actually, a past poet laureate of San Francisco named DeVora Major was part of a group of parents who decided in the 80s that they were not going to let their black children be raised by this imperialist hegemony and kept us together and really created their own small scale people's institutions so that we were raised with our consciousness protected. So our meeting was more like a relative, meet your relative than some kind of poetry co-working. In fact, I believe that if I'm remembering correct and everybody who knows me knows that my memory is terrible, but if I'm remembering correct, I think our first conversation we were talking about, bloodlines and life stories and all this type of thing. So that is our fate along with our history. So I don't know what anybody would ever be talking about. But any who, let me bring on to geniuses that haunt my waking moments for knowing they are around. I say, I must keep my pen sharp. Beginning with a brother who is kind of like speaking of the past has been the big brother to us. Those of us who would dare write poems for decades really are our leader in craft. And it's just a wonder with his just relentless pursuit of the potentials of language. I was talking about him behind his back the other day and I said, let me tell you about James Cagney. James Cagney loves poetry so much that if he was the last sentient being on earth, he would still be writing poems. I guarantee you that please check out his latest book, Black Steel Magnolia is in the hour of chaos theory. It's a Sistine Chapel. And yeah, without further ado, give some appreciation and love to my brother, James Cagney. Thank you and love you, Tango. Thank you for that introduction. And that love is real, bro. Thank you, you called it. Let me start reading some poems. This first poem is from the book. And I think my entire set, I guess should acknowledge the ancestors because this is very ancestral. The ritual of fruit begins again in June when buckets of smiling plums and blistered peaches arrive for her in cars, altering our kitchen into a steaming workshop. Soon blackened pots boil with our life's winter blood. She quickly buries the dead in a cemetery of sugar where apricots and pears are way to be baptized and born again as jam and jelly. Late summer brings chopped cabbages, cucumbers and ancient spices, all bathed in a sauna of hot vinegar and crushed red peppers. The walls of our kitchen come alive with the sweat of our ancestors who live again through recipes. The dead continue to feed the living with greasy fingers, stuffing our mouths with history's sweet cuisine. Mama leads us to her garden and motions over a field of greens. Their vibrant tongues lapping sunlight like thirsty dogs. She tells us, this is a lost art and warns that our wives will be useless to our children. Weeping, she presents the bouquet of her hands fragrant with 40 years of stewed tomatoes, summer squash, sweet corns and candied yams. She forecasts her death and instructs us to sprinkle her body with salt until her skin appears wild with dandelions. Place her in our biggest pot and simmer to a low gravy. Seal her in the glass jar tune and store her in a cool, dry place until the fog of poverty settles in the valley of our ignorance when there is only rainwater, credited bread and the memory of meat. And this is for, yeah, this is just for me. This is also from the book and it's called Private Boxes. Confusing confession with prayer again. What to let go versus what to take in. Here in this place, one of 10 unconventional places to confess, so says this dog-eared article. Thinking and not thinking of my father. Boyant, drunk and drifting away on ivory sheets through the moon's shadow oceans. If money were no object, what would I pay for an ounce of his attention and forgiveness now? I kneel, this alter a crossroads of teeth at his mouth's unused apologies. Showing myself approved or worthy of something resembling love, but not. This holy burlesque, this sacrament. Blessed water runs a freight train of blood through the weary hollers of my cheeks. I awake from yesterday's coma fluent in shame. I open my mouth like an orphaned nestling. This is called supplication. What catches in my throat unnameable. Until I, until the lowercase I, looks up to the capital I, which is another way of saying, begging for acceptance is a fool's errand in darkening us all. Anyone watching couldn't imagine I was praying to be filled with a harvest of tenderness. The most common seasoning of touch. How they critique my nest and inverted mushroom of fronds left blooming champagne butter in the dark. New psalms are being composed for instruments we never knew existed. Dewettes zippering like perfect puzzle pieces we never thought to put together. The fermented melody is in the key of honey. Let us play. Did you know Genesis birds learned to sing by accident? By excitedly punching air from one another mid-flight? The soft choke of their harmony like many church bells calling one to fall into attention and come home. You had one job and couldn't do it since grace is a corny prayer in your generation's mouth. Dizzied by what arrives embedded in every dawn, change is a blend of whiskey yawning in the mouth. Triumphant color and call all comes together now in the diaphanous blossom of your radiant mouth. My name is an untreated fungus left to dream bloom in your dark winter's mouth. I paid for this posture with hummed lullabies, the currency exchange for the static canticle in your mouth. Scoop buttery marrow sweating through bone till new skeleton weeds grow wild in your garden's mouth. With the inflamed urgency of the ocean, I climb your body's ladder of scars with my narcotic mouth. Almost got that landing and missed it anyway. 9.7 from the Russian judges on James's landing of a poem. This is called touch abstraction. There are hospitals where hands are a type of medicine. I smooth the tremulous lines along your temples with my palm. In these cellular rooms, bodies are worshiped in religions of disrepair. We burden our mouths to carry more than language. I align your tremulous temples in the room of my palm. There are hospitals where medicine is better than hands. In our mouths, bodies become religions and are worshiped with tongues. We trust our language to carry more than we understand. I align your cellular temples with hospitals and hands, hospitals and hands that burden our medicines with lines of disrepair. We praise the smooth bodies in our mouths with psalms of worship. We trust our tremulous language more than religions. My palms carry sparkling medicines into your temple. Our bodies don't understand worship or religions. We cannot trust our language any more than our mouths. Some temples are better than hospitals and some medicines useless. Every body, eye, worship suffers. Tremulous religions carried in the hands of language. And I've been abstracts for this evening. Let me end with a straightforward piece called heirloom noodles. He and I share mothers, but entirely different origin stories. Three Fridays after she died, we meet for dinner at a mirror walled restaurant. It's dervish of steaming platters, noodles, taffy pulled at the door. This feels like an affair I wanna kick away from. But he's the only one who remembers me as if my life really did happen. I don't like who I am with him. We both should be different. We, neither of us will speak in honest diagnoses of soured rooms, the body's dark and different magic, how breath sometimes will leave a path of bruises or how people frost and drop off the vine while you watch them. Your hands pocketed clean. Having buried one mother already, I know this territory. My hands salted from a hundred nights of fever. A brother should tell another what's coming as much as what's been. I've rehearsed this meal for days now, but after sitting with him, I forget my line. We play catch with silence and trivia. A crash of salt thumps the edge of his plate, rimshot to the corneas of jokes. This awkward intimacy between men, how we punch the confines of our closest embraces. All right, thank you very much. Thank you, James. Yeah. More to worry, more to worry me. Next up is a killer's killer. Genius is genius. It is only a shame that Albert Einstein never got to shake Mimi's hand. Mimi Tempest is craft as big as cosmology, just clicking on all cylinders. Power of, you know, power of literary insight and just power of power. I mean, I'm a vote for intelligent design. What do they call that? And yeah, I didn't tell you all the truth. I didn't think that Audrey Lord would ever be caught. But Mimi's given Audrey, it's by the time it's all said and done, it's gonna be quite a race. So don't further do Mimi Tempest. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Don't say anything yet. And check out Mimi's book, The Monumental Misrememberings. It's very generous of you, Tongo. Thank you. All right. All right. All right, stage one denial. At the gynecologist's office, she says there's a poison circulating through my blood, says it's chasing the embryonic versions of my existence, like a minotaur and a labyrinth. I walk home below dirty rainbows, whirling in the dead end of my womanhood, sleep for endless hours, dream in blue shaded parables, every version of myself meets for the seance, argues over the provisions of my failures and successes, maiden mother crone, sits arrogantly against the reality of my fresh disposition, each pointing her finger at the other, unable to admit shame over my new set of consequences. Stage two, anger. He's to blame. The nigga who poisoned me. And the other one who borrowed my innocence, traded it for a bump of cocaine. And the other one who mirrored me as victim to our addictions. And the other one who groped me at the after hours. And the other one who was too afraid to love me out loud. And the other one who was looking for his mother in my pussy. And the other one who deemed my body a play chest on Pleasure Island. See, the nigga who needs to read this isn't even apt to be on this page. My whole life, I've been talking to dirty walls. I'd smear my period blood and inscribe free for fun, but realized that dying was the only thing I agreed upon when I came into this cosmic plane, this revolving door of contradictions, this ongoing diatribe of avoiding all the ways this life can violently end. I know I'm on my way out. I exited stage left before my first cue. Act one, scene one, enter into an empty and noiseless stage from the wings we hear prolonged sobs echoing into a chamber of infinity and doubt. Mimi, a 30-year-old fat black and queer poet, enters grimly on stage, plops her body at its center, and locks in the fetal position. Mimi continues, my life is now a monologue of deep mourning. I will no longer keep this rage locked inside my belly. And what happens when the cage is sick of coveting me as catatonic? And what happens when I get bold enough to stick my head above the clouds and realize that a sunny day costs a dollar too many? And what happens when I tell him my womb doesn't work? I guess it will never be the object that God designed me to be blackout. See, the niggas who need to read this, they branded me a nigga-making machine. They cry revolution. Yet play cog in the utility belt of men that gang, bang Gaia, they parade around as moral men, fathers to generations of goddesses downgraded to sex slaves, boys disguised as warriors who placate their failed gender with their minuscule dicks, poets, and artists, brooding through their cities, held prisoner to their transient thoughts. They plant polluted seeds, populating thirsty minds, then laugh at the parable of consent, deem it a wayward idiom of the very thing they claim they want they never had. Oh, man, my pussy is metastasized into a doorway of consecutive non-believers. She finds truth in a psyche that's lost its grip. Her name is none. Her language barely, the hour wedged, the gag, their seamen sliding into two-day old panties, each droplet seeps into a stain of thorns and petals bushed at the opening of her now-per-slips. The moisture is fixed. Mumbles only at the crossing of legs, only at the entrance of his name. Ozzy, mendias conquering time with a fever snatching, grains of sands filtering upwards, inhaling storms, eddies of indecision to give birth, bubbling, berating, fantasies, friction, and creating life, mothering to dictate if the life is worth living, avoiding duration, avoiding living, avoiding temptation, avoiding, you thought climax would be the next word. You think what is a testimony? You believe hard thinking did too little for the heart, my pussy. She clamps down and permeates until sacred. She bites until bruised, sacrifices, and then leeches off the excess. She writes letters to strangers, bleeds for the full moon every month. She venus fly traps men who smile pearls in bright room. She venus fly traps men who smile pearls in bright room. She kisses foreign men in dark alleyways. She's determined to deepen my madness while making a bastard out of every man's strongest soldier in stage three bargaining, a message from the ancestors. This is not your fault, but it is your responsibility to heal through let the tears you cry sting like acid. Instead, I popped a tab of acid on Khalifa's Island. Heard the sirens cry from the river banks, my friend. She heard them too. She was more eager than me to dive into a divine death by convinced her that drowning was the event that was already taking place. Convinced her that they weren't beckoning for her to join them. Convinced her to hear their lullabies offering as reconciliation. Stage four, depression. I escaped from Los Angeles with a skeleton in my suitcase. It crawled out of its confinement. It pulled down my blouse and it sucked readily on my areolas. It cried unforgiven before it slept and made a scene about being wrapped in dirty sheets claimed I was harboring a desire to destroy father time. Stage five, acceptance. At the grocery store, an elderly black woman, she was plumb sweet, looked deep in the barrel of my eyes, said sadness is a towering fiend. Said he makes claim in the hollowing of your stomach, feeds you breadcrumbs and then testifies that you've been fed pie. She gave me her pen and paper, suggested I make a list of the very desire I was shopping for, suggested that the key to getting over oneself is to revel in the reality of being misunderstood. She told me your tears ain't nothing new. She suggested I continue writing into an untapped possibility. All right. I wasn't gonna read this one, this next one. But I told my mom I was getting published and she was like, that's nice, I've never heard it. That's my mom. So I decided, I'll read this one. I didn't have an intention of reading it, but we'll do it. So this is called The Apostle Peter. My uncle Pete was a Vietnam War veteran and he was a motherfucker, like he was a shit talker. He drank until the middle of the night but he was a storyteller. He was a really beautiful storyteller and he had a very complex and brutal life but it was beautiful. So when he passed in October of 2019, I had this itch to write a story about the complexity of his life and the things that he experienced while he was in the war. So I'll read this poem. I made a new deal with a new devil. We drove off in the Cadillac, the East Los Angeles curb screaming defeat. The asphalt is lined with the regularly scheduled governmental non-truths, developing bus stops on borrowed time, borrowed blood, borrowed buried in bleakness, building their Roman fantasies to buy brains that will be dumped on the sidewalk by next week. He said the payment was to be made in heart. He said that disaster was a broke man's fate. He said the heaven was necessary for the blind to be led in their slaughterhouses. He said capitalism was the white man's prophecy. He said the demolition would start on a Sunday and when the sky rang red, the new deal would begin. In the jungles of Vietnam, a skullcap of the genius's brain slid grimacing insane. The children offer cans of Coca-Cola, the thirsty marine sip on their kindness only to fill their throats being sliced open with razor blades. For $10, their mothers will fuck me good, right? Me like the Trojan horse that I am, tits bouncing fantasy and forsaken. We play with Paul Revere for 45 minutes and I come victory in widdled walls, riding into a town that isn't my own. North and South of both countries were split, but history only rewards the perpetrator, the victim, my psyche. It inspires the philosophical coat brush that comes spiraling out my mouth. The white boys go on and on about plate-owned Socrates and all I know is Joe. The homeless black man on Radio Hill who spat wisdom and joy for a plate of my mother's frijoles. He knew more about love and lost and love and lost themselves. He said that I was bought and sold in the womb. He said the nuns were right about me and he said that God didn't have shit to do with this country. He said when the sky rained napalm, my world would end on July 4th. My first goddaughter is born. She is half-nigger, half-wetback. My mother writes that my father is soled silent into a rage about her impure breed nullifying the need for soul, my spirit mourns, for home in a field of troubles. The bullets fly past my head, the serpents slither wet on my wayward legs. It's in those moments where I beg to die the most where death turns into a sanctuary from the hell that is present on earth. A hell that turns children into calculated killers. A hell that turns truth into lies. A hell that knows better but wants to see how far my instincts for survival will go. How long I will go on in this jungle without shedding a tear. Tears are for pussies. My father's voice slapping me, his whiskey-tinged breath permeating manhood and revelry. You better come back alive in a casket, but if you don't go, don't come back at all. The bullets fly past me and hits my right shoulder and my left knee. I grow more pissed at God. The target should have been my heart. When the nurse uncovers my body, the gas, they gasp at the infection. It spreads gangrene like lulomas. It drips over the ravine, dreaming of my mother's sad smile. The weight of my father's callous hands against my nine-year-old throat, the zoot suit of my Theo Franky-styled kingpin of selling pussy and cocaine. My sisters and the men, I can't save them from my brother Paul and my nieces and nephews who will romanticize me as hero. My high school sweetheart who left me for a simple man. A man whose ego wasn't warped in wartime weariness, a poet who organizes protests better than my fingers pull triggers. His words and raveling and unblemished ideology and morality with each line failing to understand that the life sacrifice for his theory on humanity was mine. Faggot hippies strung out on faggot dreams at home. Sunset boulevard is lined with them all. Walking portraits of the white Jesus that hung on the walls of San Conrado Mission Church, spreading love, peace and justice with the speech that has flared from a heroin high. They said repentance is the answer. They said I slaughtered in decency into women and children. They said death would never stop whispering unholy in my ear. And they said that the search for eternity is whiskied in every drop of the bottle. They sprayed chemicals to kill the crops. The real damage is the loitering of my soul. Six months after my return from Pleasure Island, my ears buzz heavy to the ringing of bullets. They are rooster hot Kong at an endless dawn. My nose grows into a trunk of secrets that can no longer be hidden. Stretching for mutated veins of mitosis of all my sins, it hangs below my chin and dares me not to breathe scoffs. When I eat reminds me that sleep is the poet's privilege. The Marine in me wants to shoot that part of my face off first and then ready, fire into the pounding of my chest that beats the same crimson red as the American flag. I am the elephant in the room. Memories glare back at me, the insubility of my patriotism. I am the jackass of the night. I was crated and shipped off by Uncle Sam himself to Antioch. Circumcised into the boy, I never had the chance to be stuttering my speech. The elixir drowns the doubts of a man who refuses the burden of childhood. Stuttering my speech, the nuns bruise my knuckles with rulers for every word not enunciated. Stuttering my speech, the headless American corpse runs deep into the patty fields. The commanding officer orders me to fire at the knees to seize the adrenaline that did not allow the body to drop stuttering my speech. The new timeline of my life is in the pocket of a man who drives me down through Caesar Chavez to Union Station. His red Cadillac purse, Frank Sinatra from the stereo and now the end is near. He said the payment was to be made in hearts and so I face the final curtain. He said disaster was a broke man's fate. My friend I'll say it clear. He said heaven was necessary for the blind to be led into their slaughterhouses. I'll state my case of which I'm certain. He said imperialism was the white man's prophecy. I've lived a life, a life that is full. I've traveled each and every highway. He said the demolition would start us on a Sunday one more. Much more than this, I did it my way. I'm good friends with all my bad habits. The warmth of Jim Bean satiates the prodding of my soul. The morning bleeds freshness into my lungs. The beating in my chest salutes me as a man. Approprial heart is all I ever had to offer. Thank you all for having me. I appreciate being in such great company. I didn't nobody wants to mute after that, not even to say peace out. Give more love, please, to Mimi Tepkin. Please unmute and applaud all of the great readers. You guys are incredible. You guys are incredible. And I can't even joke fight with Taco when together we make things like this happen. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Applause, applause to you all. I really, I appreciate the way you guys let me continue to play these fun games by inviting poets and inviting people to help invite poets. And I don't know if this was as good for you as it was for me, but man, I had a great time tonight. Thank you to the library. It is always an honor to engage in this kind of discourse in the Loni territory and Romantish territory. And that's all I have to say about that. Thank you, Tango, so much for being here with me. And nothing more needs to be said. Much love to everyone. Thank you, everyone. Come back. Take care. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Outstanding. Yes, thank you. Y'all have fun. Thank you so much. You all were wonderful. You all were wonderful. Just amazing.