 All right, so my name is Kay Nielsen and I'm going to read a poem. Mosquitoes crash against another dull street lamp. Garnazada's brilliant sizzle lingers over mommy's cheese man. As small men sit on their pickup trucks, lighting smoke bombs and rockets in praise of la Virgen Maria. In the Iglesia parking lot, Jesús Jose and Mariana eating chiles on the steps, ignoring abuela's urgent calls that father Carlos is watching them, laughing themselves into a second America. Thank you. Any people from Florida or have lived in Florida or know that Florida is the armpit of the United States of America? This poem is called Florida Man. These are all real headlines, by the way. Florida Man, who had sex with a dolphin, said it seduced him. Florida Man appears to vape his friend's ejaculate. Florida Man's church loses tax-exempt status because it turns out it's actually just a nightclub. Florida Man impersonating police officer pulls over actual police officers. Florida Man bitten by a snake that his friends say he enjoyed kissing. Identical twin Florida Man arrested after getting into a brick fight. 82-year-old Florida Man slashes 88-year-old Florida Woman's tires with an ice pick for taking his seat at Bingo. Florida Man attempts to trade a live baby alligator for a six-pack of Coors at a gas station. Florida Man isn't always so funny, though. Florida teens caught on video shouting homophobic slurs pummeling a gay man with lawn furniture as he tries to crawl away. Florida Woman calls me a dyke until I scream at her to leave me alone. I'm taken to the office and told I will be suspended if I have another outburst. Florida Man tells his daughter I am a bad influence and bans our friendship. So does another and another and another. When I am Florida's he-she, I am stared down and laughed at everywhere I go. When I'm 15, my mother tells me she will never go to my wedding. When my sadness splashes on the dashboard, she says I am lucky. If I think this is bad, I should really reconsider my lifestyle. Later, at Barnes & Noble, I watch a grown man imagine my blood scraped across the pavement. He's looking at me and suddenly I realize exactly why my mother thought her cruelty was the best thing that could ever happen to me here. Later, at Barnes & Noble, sorry, five years later I return from college and I can blend into the swamp. I can walk into any bookstore without seeing my obituary flash across another man's knuckles. Last summer, after two years of testosterone, I walk beside another brilliant grave, a kid who could have been me once, all soft skin and swagger, sagging jeans and the power to ignore the sharpened teeth of an entire city. It happens in slow motion. I watch another self-lock eyes with a monster inside a father's body. He stares them down and buries both of us. Somewhere, a mother feeds her child only the bitter rinds of herself and calls that a life lesson. New headline, Florida man chokes, spits up a mausoleum. I am still inside. This next poem is the reason why if you like boys, you should only date queer boys. Okay, so I'm a poetry slam person. As you can see by my T-shirt, so this is kind of interesting for me to be behind it. Can I just not be behind the podium? Is that cool? Thank you. I think I have this poem memorized. This poem is called Dear Straight Men Allergic to Eating Pussy. Is that something we're comfortable with? Would that be okay? All right, because I can do a poem about Harry Potter if you want. Eating pussy? All right. Cool, because I have like five more minutes. All right, let's see if I have this memorized. I competed with this last week, y'all. Okay. Dear straight men allergic to eating pussy. I know, there's not many of you here. I know you're trying to have, I know you're tired of us having this conversation in private, which is why I'm addressing you in front of your girlfriend. You say pennies, tuna, the leftover of any fish market left to swelter in the heat. Out of context, it sounds like you are describing the bottom of a garbage can. Curdled milk, fruit rotting inside of a closed jaw, not the part of your lover's body that could flower against the mouth. Question. Are you like really, really sure you're straight? Are you like attracted to women as people, or would a flesh light with a skirt on do it for you? Hashtag masculinity so fragile it's broken by the very soil that birthed it. What is it that scares you the most? Is it the taste? Really? Or is it the thought of her riding your face into breathlessness? Hashtag hero's death. I have another question for you. This conversation make your dick feel lonely, anxious, ignored. Imagining a sex act so devoid of your own physical pleasure must be so boring, but here I must remind you that only 30% of cis women can reach orgasm via vaginal penetration alone. This means that by a very modest estimate, you've disappointed at least 70% of the women you've been with. So imagine what she must feel like, orgasm-less and alone when you say, you won't eat pussy but you want your dick sucked. Did you know that you sound like the patriarchy finishing in its own mouth? Do you think that dick tastes like roses? Dick tastes like fucking dick and you are such a fucking jiz mop. I don't even want to tell you what you're missing, but your girlfriend complained to me last night to let me explain something to you. Eating pussy tastes like my lover's moans. Eating pussy tastes like having your head squeezed so hard by a pair of thighs you've got to wonder how Drake ever made it out alive. Eating pussy is like worshipping in the temple you were raised inside of. Eating pussy tastes like loving your partner enough to help them open up a small universe inside of themselves. Eating pussy tastes like I love you, I love you, I love you. Eating pussy tastes like sex so good you wipe your mouth then lick that hand clean, dear fuckface, I know you stopped listening the moment I stopped addressing your penis directly, but once the laughter dies, I want you to imagine every lover you've ever had tell you that your body disgusted them. Imagine that your body is the joke. So Harry Potter or a poem about someone being transphobic and me threatening to stab them? This stab poem? Is this really the, okay. Oh, someone said Harry Potter in the back. All right, that's cool. I'll do that one for you later, not during the show because I'm running out of time. Okay, so I have a content warning for this one. If you are triggered by the very intense transphobic language, this is going to be in there, so please take care of yourself and take a moment if you need it during my piece. So this happened to me like two years ago and it sucked. So this poem is called Ten Reactions to Being Told, Where Do You Live? I'm gonna follow you, you dumb fucking tranny. One, apologize until you begin to mean it. Two, try not to look him in the eyes. Men like this have no patience for defiance, don't give him a reason to engrave your epitaph himself. Three, calculate his reach. How long would it take for him to use his meaty paws like a fish hook? Four, don't you know you live here? In the shoulder checks at the supermarket, the glares at the airport, the anger that lingers over the tops of his knuckles, get comfortable. This is how you learn to breathe under all of that rage. Five, run from him when you can. Six, if your partner is with you, push her forward when she wants to run back and defend you. Watch as his eyes linger over the outline of her body like chalk. Like things that stick to your clothes. Like honey. Like that woman must belong to me. Seven, apologize anyway. Eight, but the next time bring a knife. The one with the wicked mouth at selling point, being its ability to disembowel a fully grown buck in seconds. Remind him that his name and address are engraved on the blade now nine. The next time he follows you, show him how close to home you are willing to take him. Ten, remember, be humble. This is where you live. Thank you. At that time? I have one more? All right, so do we want to do, okay, I'm so, I'm indecisive. So Harry Potter or a poem about an Air Force base? Harry Potter, but it's okay. Someone said Air Force. Do you guys, okay, do you guys mind if that's not as queer as maybe my other stuff? No? You don't mind? Cool. I'll just do my Harry Potter. Okay. This is what I'm doing. That was a page poem. I'm a stage poet. Okay. Ten years after considering getting a death eater tattoo or Severus Snape the brown boy. I'd imagined it so many times it felt like it already happened here. Black and stark against my father's least successful heirloom. When I read the story, I recognize myself immediately. The half blood rejected and arrogant half mud half magic half man half nothing. The story convinces me of my place and oh how willing I was to betray myself to sell my soul to the nearest white boy with a weapon and a promise power. And those two weak to seek it resonated with me. The half ignored boy. The only interesting part of me was what another man left behind. This is why when I stumbled across Stormfront, the world's largest white supremacist website when I was 11, I stayed. Over a jury that there was someplace out there that hated me more than I hated myself. And maybe this too is a privilege I do after all have this skin. Half black boy living inside the master's house and half his skin and all of his derision of the dark. Stormfront taught me I was an aberration, a deluminator catching light only to snuff it. But society told me I was a success story, the dark breaking open long enough to let magic inside. Growing up, I thought my father was a wizard. How else could he have pulled up the disappearing act so well? Aryan, Harry, Houdini, everywhere and nowhere, always. All I knew about him was his race and his problem with potions, so of course I wanted it. His magic and to hear a white man tell me I was his even when he didn't have to look me in the face. His whiteness and the website that carved its poplar tree onto my bones. I was 11 and waiting for a Hogwarts letter. I was 11 and thought myself a failure of genetics. I was 11 and would never be magic, but I did get that tattoo after all. I caught my mother staring at it. My betrayal, I mean. Thank you.