 So I'm going to read a few books or a few poems from my book and then a few newish ones. I'm glad to have my book because that means I'm less of a mess now when I come to things. I have all my poems with me. So I'm going to start with this one called Island's Daughter. I know the land only as my fingertips trace it, dotted roads puttering through Tuna Puna, town of my father's birth rests between market tents, white and puffy, drawn like parachutes, just landed on this map of Trinidad. I wish this map would show the highest tree my father climbed as a boy, let me ascend and meet the dare his small feet left there, and recover the prints he resolved to leave behind. I should know all he knows, I say, while his distance disagrees. Let my feet unveil what he won't reveal to me. I wish this map would show the food my father devoured. I could walk the whole of this island for the good palau, the bake, the roti. These meals melt from mountain sides and I don't know where they grow. Can I ever taste their salty steam wafting from my own stovetop if I don't know where they grow? I wish this map would show where the queer girls go. In places of pretending those girls don't exist, they hold each other somewhere, perhaps in plain sight. Perhaps they are the intertwined vines slipping through the seams of buildings as I reach for a stem firm fingers grasp my hand. I wish this map would show home. Show me why my throat sings a distorted distant echo of Calypso, why Trinidad's mosquitoes inflate me trying to resuscitate my dry, dulled skin, why guidebooks detail trails for tourists but no passages to revival for the island's daughters. This is not a map for finding myself, no. But I know where I am not. There are no lines drawn by hand. There are no parachutes to carry me gently home. This one's called what I meant to say. I made her a promise I couldn't keep. Knowing that didn't stop me from trying, stumbling over every forever before falling to rest with my head between her breasts. Maybe all I meant to say was, I feel comfortable here right now, but it came out sounding like a vow. Our first time was my first time taking a woman's virginity, though I didn't know it until she hummed something like, I've never done that before. And I said, huh? When I meant to say what the fuck? When she said, wow, I'm not a virgin anymore. I said it again, huh? When I meant to say what in the actual fuck? I should have known when she was digging through me like my pussy was a thrift store sale bin. I should have known when she stopped and gasped. I can't find your clit, though I didn't know she was trying. Or when she cooed, I see love in your eyes or maybe I've made love to your thighs. I wish I'd known before I tossed her around like a swear word empty of its meaning. Hardly scandalous enough to bring satisfaction as it clicks off the tongue. If I'd known, I might have recalled that promise I made to myself. Never to do a virgin the way somebody once did me. Here's one more from the book. This is Woman Who Love. I learned to love a woman here. By hearing the beat of my heart find the echo of water drumming in the ground beneath us. There is a balance here. Every ebb has its flow, every sunrise, a sunset. So if I love a woman till our world tilts on its side we won't be tilting long till the earth brings us back to center. I learned to love a woman by moving toward her. Inside my muscles are memories of the woman who carried me and she who carried her and the one who carried her from their blood floods the rhythm of my walk. I learned to love a woman by looking in the mirror and there I saw her, her body and mind reflecting my own, her gaze never veering from my eyes. I learned to love a woman by changing my fist from the shape of a grenade to the shape, the size, the pulse of a beating heart. A beat for every time my anger meets silence. A beat for every wall I wish to knock down. I wanted to fight fear without losing what I've learned from it so I learned to love a woman. If we hurt each other here they will only be pains of the growing kind. We hold each other like the soil hugging out our ever unfolding roots. Two women who love, that's called a revolution. Our bodies turning till we face something new till our shapes are all new and everything we touch is a blaze with hot clay of unset stone. There is a balance here. So each time I lose I learn to love and each time I love I learn to see the light of fire and every footprint behind me. I'm going to read a few more and this one's called What Do I Mean by Queer? I can't fuck you. I heard that once and I tucked it so deep under my tongue that now I can't identify myself without cussing you out and I'm almost sorry for that. And queer as in fuck me. Because it's not all about sex but if you're getting something out of demanding an explanation from me you best believe I'm getting off first. Also queer as in I can't draw a straight line for shit because no, it's not all about sex. Some of it's about how I leaned through the world knowing nobody had me in mind when they came up with our society's design. And queer as in I must have cut school straight through anatomy lessons because other people seem to know so clearly which parts belong on which bodies and whose bodies belong on whose bodies and meanwhile I'm just trying to be somebody, sidling up to somebody and I forget to check if their parts fit with mine. Queer as in no parts fit quite perfectly with mine. No body parts or parts of the globe or parts of speech in this language we speak. Queer as in I make up my own words. Come wrap your lips around them to see what I see. Thanks. So I've been writing a lot about cultural appropriation which people aren't happy about. I've been accused of like white genocide which was new. So I wrote a poem about it. This is preparation for nose appropriation. When white celebrities decide my nose is cool I'll spot its shape in the glossy pages of fashion magazines, nose jobs working their way from thin to thick and I'll wonder if they'll ever know how I grew up wishing for a nose with a body that could be born from Europe. When they decide my nose is cool white girls will deny the influence of plastic surgery as the bridge between their eyes flattens nostrils rising up rigid as two satellite dishes they'll laugh and say my nose is blacker than yours is but when I search their faces for melanin I'll see no evidence. When they decide my nose is cool I'll take to the mirror wonder about the wasted days of believing my beauty was ugly of pinching each bulbous shape on my face and imagining my fingers as shrink rays making my features more delicate, more smooth, more quiet. I already knew I was stuck in my skin but I'd learned that bodies can change that sometimes someone can say you're like a white girl in a black girl's skin and that is supposed to be a compliment. When white girls decide my nose is cool I won't be any closer to beauty. They will have makeup secrets in magazines and alabaster nose and larger cream as swell my face Instagram filter on their phones. They'll get tips for managing disgust when their fake new nose picks up more than they can handle and for politely licking what they can't smell when the surgery takes their olfactory senses away. And on the inevitable day when white girls decide that the era of the in vogue wide nose is over I'll return to the mirror thick and dark and natural as shifting earth, body and face always changing but never changed from what they were born to be. And I'm just going to read one more. This one's for Sandra Bland. It's rules for the body of a black woman. Don't let my body be anything else but womanly. This is my responsibility on this earth, my obligation in this nation where a womanly body doesn't prepare for war. Guess I'm hands up and surrender to this war I was born into just by virtue of birth into a lineage of dark goddess warriors. So don't let my body be too aggressive. In surrender there's all kinds of too aggressive. Heart beat too fast. Hands reach too quickly for the white flag I keep in my purse. Mouth too quick to say something easily read as a threat seeing as dark lips are involved. Don't let my body be too brave. May there always be a tremble, always a gulp. May the presence of authority send me cowering back to a history where nobody needed handcuffs or jail cells to keep me captive. Even Brie Newsom, brave as she is, thought you never know who might walk by as she clutched the top of the Confederate flagpole. Could have been someone wearing the very flag she was tearing down. Could have been someone holding a gun, someone who'd want nothing more than to see her body hanging. And she could have let that stop her if she hadn't been too brave. Don't let my body be too soft. Without some sliver of resistance left where would a night stick find satisfaction in the skin it strikes when it beats into me? Don't let my body be too shapely not like Bessie Smith, not like Josephine Baker, not like Misty Copeland, the first of us at the top of the American Ballet Theatre where she's forgotten the ballet code more important than pointing your toes. The one that says a body with curves that stretch a leotard film then takes up too much space, even on the biggest stage. But don't let my body be too thin. You need to be able to spot me when you want to. You need something to hold on to, don't you? Even with my fingers full only when I'm feeding another body, tell me again how I'm only somebody if I'm somebody's mama or I'm mammy to another body's babies. Don't let my body be beastly. I'll continuously straighten up into civilization or else I'll revert to some uncultured vision of victory in nature of all wretched things. Or I'll also have a body like Serena Williams, championed arms unstoppable in battle and flexing the muscles to prove it. Don't let my body prove anything but dedication to the promise that I am womanly. Don't let my body be graceless. Make my body arouse other bodies, but don't let my body touch too many other bodies and don't let my body be mine, never mine. Let it be a white woman's doll, let it be a white man's pleasure, let it be yours. But don't let it be good enough or you'll have to call it something else. Call it savage, call it insane, call it devoid of spirit or just a body, already just a body even before I'm dead. Let my body be an animated corpse, my life only just an imagination, my imagination as the lone instrument with the audacity to speak as if I am alive. If I die in police custody, I did not hang myself. If I die in police custody, I did not defy handcuffs to sever my own spine. If I die in police custody, it wasn't my own boots searing an imprint into my neck and I hope somebody has this recorded. Don't let my body get tired. With all the burden these contradictions create, I'm bound to get tired, but once I've surrendered my body for dragging through this bullet-ridden bone-breaking concrete sea, tired's just another word for beaten. And like the nightsticks find, my body's still got some resistance in me. Thank you.