 Ginny Callan, I'm the director here at the T.W. Wood Gallery, and we're really pleased to be hosting another poem city here. And we are one of the few sites that is not accessible, but we're in the process of getting an elevator installed, so we're really excited about that. So by next year, we'll be able to get everybody up here for poem city and for all our art opening. So I'll just talk to you very briefly about what happens here at the gallery, and then Tom Cohn is going to introduce our poets and dancers for tonight. So the gallery exhibits both contemporary artwork of Vermont artists, and we also are part museums. We're always showing work of Thomas Waterman Wood, who was born and raised in Montpelier in the 1800s, and we have another room that's designated for works in the 1930s and 40s during the Works Progress Administration. We have art camps for kids, vacation camps. We really try to do a lot to bring young families and children in to have lots of fun art activities. And we have a playground out back, because this is an old Catholic school that we've renovated. And we do classes. There's a felting class here tomorrow, and lots of good stuff happening all the time. You can sign up on a sheet out in the hallway if you want to get in our email list, which we have a newsletter that comes out once a month that tells you about all the great things that are happening here. And you can also make donations, become a member. We're a nonprofit, and we survive by having people support our community art programs. So thank you for coming, and Tom, why don't you come on in? Thank you, Jenny. So this is a wonderful gallery. And Jenny has been director for a few years, and she's done a wonderful job. She's retiring next month. Oh, it will still manage somehow. But she's done an absolutely wonderful job here. The Caloc Hubbard Library has been presenting poem city for 10 years now. So we have events going on throughout the city of Montpelier and in Berlin, Calas, East Montpelier, Middlesex, and Worcester, the other towns we serve. Out in the table, there are programs which have listings for the whole month. So we have a couple of dozen different things going on. This is one of them. We would not be able to do this without the generous support of the National Life Group Foundation, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hunger Mountain Co-op, and Vermont Humanities Council, and most important of all, Poetry Society of Vermont. Hey, George. And also, we wouldn't be able to do it without the TWA Gallery and other organizations in town that partner with us on various events so that we can have things in a lot of locations and have more things than we could ever fit just in the library. So tonight, to entertain you and inspire you, because that's what art does, we have two poets and two dancers. Rosa Castellano received an MFA in Poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She and her family returned to Virginia this past fall after spending nine years living outside of Burlington, Vermont, which is just outside of Vermont. While in Vermont, she was an active member of the writing community, participating in workshops and reading and leading monthly poetry workshops for the Burlington Writers Workshop. In 2017, Rosa was a finalist for the Salem College Center for Women Writers, read of Poetry Prize. Leread Guerra is an independent dance and movement artist born and raised in Quito, Ecuador. She has experienced dance in various communities where she has collaborated in contemporary and post-modern creative processes with talented artists and friends as a performer and choreographer. Gloria Anzaldula has been an inspiration to Maria since she moved to Vermont three years ago. Dance is the love of Maria's life and she is grateful for sharing space with talented artists and friends in this evening of Poetry and Dance. George Longenecker's recent poems, books and book reviews and short story a short story, had been published in Bryant Literary Review, Evening Street Review America, Rain Taxi and the Main Street Rag. His book, Star Route, was published in 2018. George is president of the Poetry Society of Vermont. George lives in Middlesex with his wife Cynthia Martin. Alana Rancourt Finney is a dance artist. She earned an MFA in dance from Smith College in Massachusetts. She uses the art of performance and improvisation in her work. She also enjoys creating community, community dance opportunities for all to participate. She relocated to Montpelier three years ago with her husband, her seven-year-old son Ray, and Shih Tzu. She has been re-routing herself as an artist in the central Vermont community. Would you please welcome Rosa, Alana, George and Marina. You'd think, you'd think I'd be around for a while. Tangled mess in my chest comes from there. Pressure of what came before me. These are the chances, what it is, according to the world of numbers. Women lost in one way or another. One way or another. In one way, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one. My skin, my nose, my breath keeps going. Like a motor, metronome. I stop it. No. No, no, no way. No way. No way. Lost. No way to stop it. Just keeps going. Do this with me. The small bit of business, I am losing my voice. And I need you to tell me if I'm speaking loud enough. If you can hear me or if you have trouble, just go like this and I will do the best that I can to project. My father was a storyteller. Drunk or sober, he had words. Do not doubt he begin. Before a man is a man, he's a boy. Hungry, itchy, hot, lonely. The boy crouched on the branch of a jacaranda. A fountain blowing purple flowers like wishes over the weed-grown lot. His stories always had trees. I am not a storyteller, but do not doubt the brown and bony beginning. The girl I was enatted terry cloth shorts too short. Hungry, sweating hot and lonely. Who prayed a hurricane to launch the loblolly and send them sailing through the walls of our Florida green double-wide trailer. Let me begin again. Once upon a time, my dad drank his K car into a tree. After I squeezed into the crushed V of the hood like a brown Alice in a ruffled metal wonderland. Following the sun-heated steel to the cracked and shining glass where I raised my arms in a coffee-colored arch and prayed. I prayed the moss down from the trees. I prayed the father from the house. I prayed until the stars that swum inside my 12-year-old body flew out my eyes, white-hot as the sun burning the steel gripping cloth tearing thigh to scar. It's a mouth that dark thumb of skin. A story curious as the shine of glass on asphalt or the way the wind can suddenly come from nothing. In case I forget who the handgun is for. Tell me Bill. I had this poem rising like Mahler's ninth. It's melodrama of plantation at sunset. A be-columned beauty all white lines above an orchard screen and yet underneath the elegant cut of that super fine coat dog bark and bare feet slapping the broad planks of an Alabama morning porch. I knew a man once without an accent who believed that plantation life was good for blacks. That Michael Jordan never would have jumped so high if someone hadn't bred him to it. This man kept a lady's silver-handled gun tucked daintily into the neck of his boot just in case he would tell me walking me to my car after work. Just in case. I think it's really great that Jenny mentioned at the beginning that they have artwork from the WPA here. This next poem comes from artwork from a WPA artist working in Harlem and in New York City in the 1930s. His name was Robert McNeil and the photograph showed just a group of women African-American women standing on a curbside waiting for work. It's called The Block. 1937. The Bronx. Ghosts exist. I've seen them in the pneumonia fog waiting for work. The kind that comes in limos and shiny sedans. The vogue housewives behind the wheel. My mother tried the city where bow-lipped secretaries arched their pencil brows. The ad didn't call for color, they'd say. Today under a dishwater sky. She waits. Under fire escapes with women bent and straight. Some neat. Some without stockings or hats. All carrying bundles. Their work clothes wrapped in paper. A large girl is inspected by a woman with a dog in her purse. For wrapped, another wants to know how much my mother can lift. I can't hear what Mama says, but the woman nods, takes a gloved finger to her face to swipe watery beads from her cheek, her hair and asks my mom if she steals. Mama shakes her head and rain is the worst music I've ever heard. The drops carry the sound of hauling wood and babies to her breast of something up and downstairs. Mama has no smile for me. No frown either as she follows the lady to her car. We watch her go drawing air as the breathing or the lowest kind of work. Star Trek. It always comes back to the prime directive which my father claims was a protest of the Vietnam War. Back then, he saw himself a black Captain Kirk cruising the cosmos and afra and tight gold shirt going where no man from his neighborhood had gone before. He crossed over into suburbia to ring doorbell after doorbell, holding his breath, waiting for a face to materialize. In this moment, he was captain of a starship and like the Klingons witnessing Kirk's arrival, those housewives saw something alien among their miracles. Good afternoon. Sometimes the only part of his speech he could say before doors slam shut. Sometimes they invited him wanting to know why he wasn't over in Vietnam or if he knew Dr. King. In living rooms haunted by the nightly news, my father gave monologues on the merits of Britannica. While they searched his face for the fire they'd seen the night before, as sanitation workers from Memphis marched across the screen, I am a man printed on the signs they carry. Sometimes they chased him off before he even had a chance to speak, shouting or throwing rocks and sticks after him like a rabbit dog. And sometimes the air itself seems to want his blood and he struggled to imagine Spock and McCoy flanking him, phasers ready. On the road that summer he owned nothing but the sky and what he could imagine there. This next poem was inspired by my uncle and is told in the voice of somebody recently released from prison but it is a male voice so you have to use your imagination a little bit. It's called A Drought of Bars. If there's anything in this world worth worshiping, your dove soft snores challenge me to find it. Windows painted shut years ago, hold in the heat and the stop goes song of the cars. Tents as the passengers on the bus where I work. Behind me they sit staring straight ahead away from the gaze of the panhandler jostling up the aisle crumbs of an old biscuit on his collar. A greasy bag open to accept whatever we have to give in the center of our bed your body makes a small sea. I kiss the curve of your cheek and you roll away even asleep you're angry and maybe you're right. Maybe I had a little too much to drink and maybe it didn't help that I came home so late but some nights no matter how much I want to it's hard to just be in this room after sleeping on a bunk like a boy. I have a job now and I have you and I try not to think about the years I lost shuffling around that dusty yard. I can't talk to you about it. I won't what I can tell you is that I've been giving that homeless man money. I know I shouldn't. I can smell how he spends it but the way he moves it's like he's got this rope around his neck and I have to help because inside I'm dried up an empty riverbed and I don't know if the rain will come again. This next poem is called Souvenir of Red Summer for the postcard dead and it's I don't know if you know what red summer is referring to in this instance but I'm talking specifically about when African-American veterans came home from World War I and the outbreaks of racialized violence that took place all over the country incited in large part by the sight of these men in their uniforms. This poem also works to talk a little bit about the postcards of lynchings that were traded and sent and collected by people. So there is some violence in this poem so I feel like I should tell you. Souvenir of Red Summer for the postcard dead a ruin this boy his face hid by the river turning him gently like his mama those mornings her hand going first to the small of his back a prayer in that early light when his body meets the mouth of the river it's speaks in the language of lynching a language it learned long ago from the trees from the pipe glinting among the river rocks from the trace caught against a boulder surprised to have found itself used to beat a trail into a woman's back the engine chain still wrapped around the boy's neck tells the tale of easy violence of the sport of beating a body to blood and meat and of those thousands the mothers and fathers their boys and girls hoisted high onto shoulders picnics at the ready and that soldier home from France a black twist in the background of a photo and I'm going to close with till beauty ends murder till beauty ends murder it'll start where it always starts with a body floating down the Tallahatchie River under a sky so heavy with stars that's what that what's left drifting between the shores those broken arms and legs are not an ending they're only the landscape they are the twist and curve of oak leaves as they float down their rustle beneath our feet familiar as the boy leading out on the sidewalk did he have candy in his pocket that looked like a gun no it starts with a ship a crossing a captain and a cargo of men and women a tangle of arms and legs and languages a child tossed to the sea her cry wind caught the father roped all night in the rigging his body blacking the stars below a woman belly full yanks her hair out by the roots I can't explain how the simple possession of such a body brings with it the hundreds of years and millions of bodies bursting with the scar bright taint of murder what's burned into my DNA is a song of survival and shame drum so deep into my bones it is the push pull music of my blood and yet for me there is no history that matters except that I have inherited the skin and hair of my grandmother and my children have not and so it starts for me with a sky the night my son was born the moon an empty boat rocking back and forth as I pushed life from life fist and blood and love a black cap of hair my son the world you live in is different from mine and so again I will try to explain the end work why my high school boyfriend wouldn't introduce me to his mother and the hundreds of other ways we are told over and over again that this world is not meant for since words are just words it will start for you where it always starts with a body and the police the night they drag your cousin from the car a flashlight in your eyes and a gun barrel in his thank you so much for other nameless people who sleep on cardboard and blankets in the entry of garage alcoe just a block from the grand america hotel the finest place to stay in Salt Lake City soft beds in a chick setting it's still cool at dawn but before long pavements too hot to touch all day they rest on a narrow strip of lawn by a parking lot shaded by windings robins and sparrows nest in the trees search for bugs or scraps behind a wall hotel guests rest on chase lounges order drinks and lunch by the pool all day people pass by how sad disgusting lazy addicts once in a while somebody drops a few coins by October icy winds will slice down city streets who knows how many will be left after winter though some will die in the heat long before then slow euthanasia these castoffs who search for scraps and trash bins hotel guests come and go from restaurants high above balcony lights come on together they huddle for another night maybe dreams will bring them these poems are for all those who have no home thanks to the Kellogg Hubbard library puts an enormous amount of work and bottles and Victoria's Secret Tim searches for five cent bottles and cans along the Manuski River fills his sack crosses the tracks to the redemption center lots more back there he tells the clerk is she hands them a dollar seventy it's a good day but what I found Tim shows her a damp Victoria's Secret catalog bronze model and purple bra and panties on its cover my daughter would like this her name is Victoria to Victoria left years ago with her mother after Tim's Vietnam memories returned like a grenade to the head he pockets the money leaves with his sack of bottles and Victoria's Secret behind the store Tim sleeps near the river under a railroad bridge near redemption he says when people ask him where he lives his mind floats driftwood on the Manuski kids walking home from school give him change and leftover lunch one student wrote of Tim in a PTSD report hundred creosote stains the bridge trains hauling granite rattled the tracks above his bad bed wraps on feather feet story by on their way to dumpsters he sees Victoria with her alphabet blocks TCDD PTSD 245 TCDF he hears bullets smells before we have like oranges roll beer bottles but it all blows away as red maple leaves and snowflakes drift onto his bed Tim watches ice bones and water everything washes away it was a cajun cafe I liked by a bio one of those slow-moving south Texas Creek went there after Bobby died but that's another story a different poem I needed a margarita and some comfort food something to wash away tears of pain they had great crabs and oysters Jade and wouldn't be on surrounded it's covered that green growth so much almost eat the building five or six slider turtles bass the man may fall one of what's happened to that cafe I can see it's been more than 20 years see crab cakes and fried oysters floating off the plates out of the kitchen chefs practical dish washers wading to the parking lot modern day DOS yeah the tables put out to join sewage along chairs and slider turtles free at last from their pond seem baffled by all this water which rises up out of bay and values over kitchen snows snuffing burners left on wash away dinners margarita glasses and all of Houston floats and brown water we have a three-way view not of Boston Harbor or any base of Garrison Street and Huntington Avenue we're a tent long after sunset tourists return from restaurants and neighbors walk along an alley lies a man on a scrap of carpet savage trash bellows and screams all along a police siren wails and C sharp the passes something's not quite right with this view for our B&B and it hasn't been right for a long time but within sight of the Marriott and Lucas diners drop five hundred dollars for dinner parties someone screams from the alley and nobody really listens oh there may be help a place to sleep for a while a few people care enough to hand him a fly but he's the detritus of the United States of America toss the slides aside like the unneeded scrap of carpet on which he sleeps a piece that didn't fit easier to fund the new war perhaps then deal with waste of the past early next morning he's gone along with his carpet already people walk their dogs return with Sunday papers cups of coffee bags of croissants and bagels Labor Day she pulls sheets her pack perhaps she irons pillowcases before dawn she waits for the boss perhaps she speaks Somali or Spanish he feeds the dishwasher perhaps he makes bread before dawn he waits for the box perhaps he speaks Serbian and then golly she holds the stock side he mixes mortar and sun rises over concrete forms she pours your coffee they speak Haitian Creole or Arabic or English or Bosnian or many languages we want to smoke but I forgot who baked our bread who stitched our shirts have we forgotten them forgotten ourselves forgotten how to speak walls before I built a wall I asked to know what I was walling in or walling out rather cross mending wall there's a stone wall that borders our woods whose only use now is a boundary open places it doesn't even follow the survey line maybe once it kept sheep in or out stones long ago gone to moss and light them where there was pasture now it's pine and birch who this wall keeps out I'd like to ask but even frost would build a wall a president proclaims build a wall around the USA keep out illegal as long as transplants terrorists don't obstruct progress he's not the first there was the no-nothing party in the 1850s when my stone wall was built then it was Irish Catholics and Germans to keep out the president thinks he has a new idea but cross knew the walls and hate the fire back in time the great wall of China couldn't keep out and just calm Adrian's wall kept nobody out of Britannia the Berlin wall last less than my lifetime it's getting dark as I return home I stopped to replace the stone that's fallen Orion's already up in the east one day someone may come upon a crumbling wall and wonder why people were walling out those they could invite it in shores of less votes you may forget but let me tell you this someone in some future time will think of us softball they float in boats too small for these waves even on this short crossing from Anatolia to Lesbos rafts and dings unfit for a lake much less the Aegean sea parents clutch small children tightly as waves crest will splash over guns some vomit some from a lot of how they came kawul and Mosul when ties are right they cross the straight to Greece to the island lesbos for volunteers bring water loads of bread fish tomatoes south listeners and bandage feet give children's use some will never land alive like the child found on a pebble beach no wife jack and eyes pecked out by bells some will be forced to return maybe on planes and buses at least not in rafts but some will be locked into pens to wait send them back don't let them in no more where will they go nobody knows back to where rain is fired walk off wait in the supermarket check out while I pretend I'm not really reading tabloid headlines who's 18 pounds a week walk off wait cooking for two the sales clerk brings up pizzas broccoli and beer while we wait to unload their car the children kept on for seven days their mother's one of a few parents still alive once in a while they ride but usually they walk they've all lost weight in just a week they cross over and wait near the border the line is way too long and they're also thirsty at the refugee camp at last so many tents and people but no more walking perhaps the children can eat drink gain weight if they ever live in a house again she'd be cooking for two all of her family that's left today's moon shark shows a new moon on March 12th and full moon the same day can this be the phases of the moon have converged but perhaps we're living on another world a plant with two moons orbiting in different elixids after all if the moon chart is in the weather report it must be true right maybe it's like that comic strip twinner as I read every day when I was a kid earth and tarot both habitable our sister planet governed by well and now we know there are planets just 40 light years away where we could survive if things go wrong here and it's not looking so good for earth so maybe I'll catch the next saucer for terror or some other world as long as they have two moons robins and lilacs in spring moonlight every night but that maybe we're time travelers who live in parallel universes one with a full moon and one with a new moon there are days when I need another world my self-righteousness hate and bigotry become too much for me a little planet overheats and storms care away at sand dunes would we do better give it a second chance on a new planet we're in a parallel universe with two moons and different robins I'm not so sure even with another full moon each month there may still be the lion saying false leaving the same moon can be both full and you flower bakery and cafe outside tables on a sunny Saturday we hear Spanish Arabic as kids banter back and forth going from English to several other languages this is a cafe day south and summer people enjoy their tuition muffins coffee ripples in my cup two toddlers stick close to their parents tables look around at the Corgi and Kali resting on the warm cement under tables inside there's a line for breakfast immigrants come here to teach at universities to work in factories to work at this cafe people like my grandparents came a hundred years ago and lived up to North Shore last weekend people carried swap stickers inside go home white supremacy their ancestors must have been immigrants too like most of us having breakfast here oh the history of xenophobia is long history forgotten here or there north south east west ancestors came on ships to this Harvard to many harbors airports and train stations are in chains on slave ships owned by merchants lived not far from this cafe this is home this is why my grandparents came a big grand cafe with breakfast and half a dozen languages a red sun rising over the city footsteps of bricks thank you so much means you are neither spana India negra espanola in a watch it is nice pizza will have we caught in the crossfire between camps while carrying all five races on your back not knowing what side to turn to run from to live in the borderlands means knowing that the indian you betrayed for five hundred years is no longer speaking to me the mexicanas call your agendas that the nine the angle inside you is as bad as the nine the indian for black when there's an affrontera people walk through your aburra way scapegoat for runner of the new race half and half both woman and man neither a new gender to live in the borderlands means to put Shiva in the forest eat whole wheat tortillas big text mess with a Brooklyn accent be stopped at the border checkpoint living in the borderlands means you fight hard to resist the cold electric vacuuming from the bottle the pool of the gun barrel the rope crushing the whole of your throat in the borderlands you are the battle ground where enemies are came to each other you are at home a stranger the border disputes have been settled the volley of shots have shattered the troops you are wounded lost in action dead fighting back to live in the borderlands means the mill with a razor white key wants to shred off your all the red crush out the kernel your heart pound you pinch you roll you out smelling like white bread but dead to survive the borderlands you must live see in front the across while carrying all five races on your back which side means knowing that the Indian you betrayed for five hundred years is no longer speaking to you Mexicans call your agendas I in the annual inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or black the virus in la frontera steals your voice a scapegoat for runner of a new race he is speak text max with a Brooklyn accent be stopped by the media at the border checkpoints means you fight hard to resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bar disputes have been settled your shots have shattered the troops you are wounded lost in action means the mill with a razor white key wants to shred off your olive red skin crush out the kernel your heart pound you pinch you roll you out smelling like white bread but dead to survive the borderlands you must live see from the back side of your