 Welcome. I'm Jeffrey G. O'Brien. I direct the lunch poem series at Berkeley, along with Noah Warren. And we're thrilled to have Arya Aber here. We would be thrilled to have her any time. And this is a time. So we are thrilled. This reading is not a relief from what is happening in the world and in the nation. It's a reinvigoration of attention to all of the beauty and horror that is always transpiring. And certainly is transpiring now. Arya Aber's first book, Hard Damage, is a documentary work in the fullest sense, not in the subgenre sense only. Every moment in the book is a moment of fierce attention to both beauty and horror. Attention to language, to multiple languages. A kind of attention that is full of both various states of belonging and unbelonging. And being spread across multiple languages, multiple sites of origin and living, I think help make the poems listen to themselves as they inventory everything in the world. From plants to examples of U.S. imperialist atrocity and back again. I think it's clear that this book wants to understand everything else that is happening in every moment of its attention. So that attention is not ever some kind of isolated function that makes us forget. This is a book that wants to preserve memory and preserve present moments of attention in their fullness in a kind of radical clarity that is upsetting and inspiring although never only consoling. I wanted to just read one line that ends a poem in the early in the book, Dream with Horse, not a day passes that I pass as belonging here. I think it's an incredible line and incredible metonymy for Aber's project in that it passes from a kind of innocent idiom for a time, a day passing into passing as both belonging or a practice of attempting to belong or being seen as belonging whether or not one does. It's not only that there are two senses of past there, it's literally the passing from one sense of past to the other that I think shows all of the intelligence and moral force and self attention as well as attention to the world that is everywhere in Aria's work. A little bit later on in the book, we get a mention of the flower Alyssum, and it's right next to the word asylum. And I think there we can see the same kind of work happening. They have nothing to do with each other etymologically, but they sure look a lot alike when they're rendered adjacent. The final thing I'd say is that Aber renders everything adjacent to everything else, which is the truth of the world. And it requires something as simple as the inventorying of that physical world that is full of beauty, but also the political the geopolitical that is always around and within any of those acts of attention. I'm really glad that we're going to hear some of those acts performed for us so that we can listen to that listening and seeing. Please join me in welcoming Aria Aber. Thank you Joffrey for that beautiful, beautiful introduction. It was always a dream of mine to read at lunch post and it's happening over zoom right now, which is a different kind of situation that I imagine but I'm incredibly grateful for this, especially this week. I'm going to start reading them. Reading Rilke in Berlin into English I splintered the way my father clutched his release at the airport defeated and on American. It took me 12 strange springs to know nothing occurs out of a sudden. How do I let it go. The world has been prolonged for me, and the ghosts of childhood still civil aid, by which I mean, nobody has touched me on my innermost parts. At the accent reduction class, my teacher instructed me to invert my tongue like in love. So I lay at a pavement under your elegy in a bridge. The darkness the want to put inside me a perfect sentence. What would have Lou Salome done. I absolved every year around the sun, knowing that there is an animal smell hooked to a line leading past the border. I am not going to cross. So what is exile exactly. What exact to to. Father says power for our aloe for hello. Father says is good, don't come back, eat fruit, green card. If I could explain to him the difference between exist and exit, maybe others too will hear the law and a law. I asked my mother, where are you from. She smiled and replied, fine, how are you. Oh, I shove my hand right through the officer's mouth and ripped out his tongue. Then, under my pillow, I placed it and waited for it to bloom new my blood. I wrote this book in Wisconsin, where I experienced the most difficult winter of my life, and realized that snow was quite oppressive, and that inspired the next couple of poems that I'm going to read. Snow, how easy for snow to turn to ice for snow to disappear the light from the ragged frame of chestnut trees around the warehouse by what's left of wild chicory scraped sculptures, we pink dog pain hunger borders this land while snow turns all to immigrants. Snow salts the embankment where turtles wash ashore, literally hundreds of them frozen heart like grenades of tear gas thrown across a barbed wire fence. But who of their right will would ever want to climb that fence to live here. I pray each night for grace hoping to pass through the darkened veil of shit to bear witness to smokestacks while champion napweed, who loiter around cricks glistening with oil, which once gone will like death at last democratize us all. Potato sacks and the snow capped abandoned warehouse, their huddle and sit the soiled refugees bereft cow eyed, picking dirt off their scouts, their shelled souls. Asylum worthless as my mother and nestled on her lap as I in love with the light of the first snow of my life, so odd and doubtful still of what lengths the frost with us to go and what shape it will then take. Asylum, even poverty can be glamorous if you insist. It's rusted on elevator floors so gilded I mistake it for a drink it. Mother burrows her face and my hair. She bites my skull for a hole. We try to integrate. It is a dream to have enough for a car. As one day will drive past palm trees to gas stations and by lemon salted almonds, by what she means one day will have a house. Our failures spread breadcrumbs into prayer beads. We are by default religious. Before I brush her wet face. I am still young. Who wouldn't be humiliated by a cold room the size of a casket teeth cracked with ice. But suddenly with her and my arms. I am no longer small. Dirty and hungry like a parasite. I wish I could carry my mother my life's true love toward a mirror. As if her caravan beauty could console her. Huddled together like lovers and frost I watch ends march to her inflamed eye socket. A spectacular procession. God is what we lack a shelter for the fragile to pass through. Does this refugee can look like a life to you. On paper I have a birthright. The sadness framing my mother's eyes. This is meaningless. But it makes me invincible in theory. In theory my mother is not a tongue running along the coin lock of a shopping cart looking for the promise of more. But when did theory deposit me. When by me dinner. Come to me. Let me brush your face. Poverty contains by necessity poetry. Mother says. One step after another. To return to where we've come from what mean to mourn to mourn to mourning. Upstairs the blue uncertainty wafts its clouds like unfurled flags. The workers hand out flip phones great juice sleeping bags. So we remain silent in the fibrous shatter. Faithful to our gold feet. At night I sing a lullaby to mother cradle her in my arms. I feed her a spoonful of glass by mourning she will be a window. And because John free mentioned the poem. I think I'm going to read it dream with horse already November makes a full of me. Sun secretes its tacky yellow gauze on what the snow melt has divided slaughterhouse the domesticated knack. I am at a loss in the shadow of the spruces. I freeze a faint scent of equine. Taught as a tuning fork I meditate on the horse's heavy meat its nostrils glistening like a liver laboring to breathe. The real shackle of course is in my flesh but my mind's harness committing its slow violence through my eyes. Looking for a sign I smear on snow my sputum then hair. Not a day passes that I pass as belonging here. There is this American obsession with European cities. A quite romanticized obsession. Which to me as a person who was born and raised in Europe feels a little bit absurd because of course tourists ignore the underbelly of these glorified European cities. And my relationship to Paris in particular inspired the next poem. I have one funeral in Paris. The aunts here clink Malbec classes and parade their grief with musky expensive sense that whisper and elevators and hallways. Each natural passing articulates the unnatural. Every aunt has a son who fell or a daughter who hid and rubble for two years until that knock of officers holding a bin back filled with a dress and bones. But what do I know. I get pedicures and eat Madeline's while reading Swan's way. When I tell one aunt I'd like to go back she screams it is not yours to want. Have some cream cheese with that says another. Oh what wonder to be alive and see my father's footprints and his sister's garden. He's furiously scissoring the highest sense saying all the time when the teller researcher asks him how often do you think your life is a mistake. During the procession the aunts Wales vibrate wires full of crows and heavy wind. I hate every ballooned minute of it. God invented everything out of nothing but the nothing shines through said Paul Ballery. Paris never charmed me. But when some stranger asks if it stinks and Afghanistan. I am so shocked that I hug him. And he lets me his ankles briefly brushing against mine. Can you describe your years in prison. Over Skype I tried to document my mother's ball shaved youth. She has a surplus and truths and science has proven what it had to prove. Every helicopter screech I dreamt of was my mother's first. Rippling my dumb hand I wake up in childhood script where prayer is keyless as a foreign laugh over her. And on the masjid school belt glow the ghost. An angel. No no. Who am I kidding. When I say God, what I mean is, I can barely stand to look at my mother's face. So what if I've never seen what she's seen. I took the shape of her 206 bones. I did not choose her eyes. Did not choose to mastic hate the ash of witness her crooked smile disclosing a swarm of flies. Yes, missiles held their named after ancient gods. Her a word of disputed route, maybe from irate beloved. And because my beloved is not a person, but a place in the headline, I point to and avert my gaze. I can now ask, would I have given up my mother for an elism instead of asylum. Or one glass of water that did not contain war. My mind, yet what I needed most was a roof to collapse on her like earth around storms. Rain, the hard absence of skin. The silence of it. No gust and my goddess. No artificial wind. I'm going to read some poems that are later in the book. This poem has an epigraph from a BBC news article in 2007. Nostos. Today, they have uncovered a mass grave in an underground prison on the outskirts of the capital couple, which dates from the Soviet era. BBC news. 2007. Today, I've been moved by how the skeletons were found. Skulls with cloth around the eyes, wrist bones tied by rope. A miracle that fabric, what color was it, what material has touched even witnessed the suffering of those 2000 men who stood naked with their eyes bound and were raped before they were shot. I suspect lie my great-grandfathers and my mother's youngest brother's remains. What is it about the disappeared, that survival, this dumb extravagance insults us so. I felt nothing when I sleep the odd cheese, my student and ex marine wrote. In fact, those barbarians felt easy, like buildings and Mazada Sharif. What could I have said. I praise the urgency of subject, her apt simile. To fight, you understand, was aimless. I've been primed for this, for disappearance, all my life. I dreamt of my student that night, her voice muscling the soft framework of memory whistling. Leiche, leiche, leiche. Dearest, I wonder why in English, the body is both dead and alive. But I know the blight of grief has a heart and thus will love and learn and thusly learn to hate. I want to believe that he too settled porous into the light. He was 21 when they took him in for questioning. My uncle, I mean. Do not return, my mother shouts from her sleep. Do not return. His eyes were green. I have another poem that's inspired by a cold, wintry state in the United States. This one's set in Farmington, Maine, where I did a reading at the University of Farmington, organized by the great poet Aaron Lorsom. It's a cross-service of Farmington, Maine. He makes me sit next to him, so I inquire as if remembering his own smallness would prevent him from violating another's about his childhood. Cape Cod, he recalls. Longly he felled among the blue expanse each winter, longed to travel, so he joined the Marines. And I did travel, he fools, all the way to Afghanistan. When I tell him that's where I'm from, his laugh crumbles, and I'm sorry for a trembling in me or in him, I can't tell. Too chagrin to look at his face, I observe crumb holes, blurs of frozen buds. Avons are good people though, he disarms himself, and damn that food. But I loathe my almond blood, especially here in the snowy balsam furs in cookie cutter houses. They saved, you know, his words butter me, my life. Gave me bread, warmth. They didn't have to. Bad things happened. Awful things. Nothing is calmer today. Cobblestone mourns contaminated water, and another suicide bomber. I shouldn't tell you this, but he coughs. I miss it sometimes. The provinces were so hot, it was like another planet. I will never feel at ease here, between subalpine hills, gas stations advertising Nescafe and Dove. But after eight years on the base, his voice clear as a fist, you wake up hating the person in the mirror. Now my life is about forgetting, his memory to a privilege. I couldn't, after I arrived in the States, remember a single damn village. Is it a sin then to be envious that my driver had a home in my home, yellow dust on a long mountainous roads, where 22 civilians died in the fourth attack this month for longer than I ever did. He has, I feel, estranged me. You know, I hear his heavy American voice crack like a creek, thawing under a deer. It's good to be back. The unspeakable opens between us, its waters, cold, full of shame, until we drift apart again, never asking for each other's names. I'll read one more poem from Heart Damage, and then I'll read some new stuff. Reading Rilke at Lake Mendoza, Wisconsin. I have relinquished my shame now that I have mastered what wasn't lent to my name. Three languages, one of them dead. It is hard to miss the love all that isn't as absurd as my forked childhood. It's the first of the men's he's had as a stethoscope to have hours upon hours to marvel at words like driftwood, trope, miss the love. To miss my life and couple is to tongue pairs laced with needles. I had no life in couple. And then can I trust my mind's long corridor. It's longing for before. I have a faint depression polluting my heart sings the lake. But there is music and everything if you tune into it, devastates me. Even trauma sounds like town, the German word for dream. Even in the dirty atrium, Lou was waiting, tenderly for Rilke. He signed his letters, the apostrophe full of love. Oh, and love I was always and providential. But what I want is not of love. It's meatless mojo and linemen for me. I do not want to open, neither for food nor men. For loneliness, I keep a stone to kiss at night the entirety of me arches not toward the black square of absence, but toward you, the cormorant. Every bird is an acquaintance of death. So every bird reminds me of you. The true sparrow, the egret, the peregrine falcon, but especially the double crested cormorant. Its iridescence and scribing the April sky, revealing for a moment, the other world exiled inside ours. All that heaving and glimmering brought Over and over, I whispered to myself the name of this bizarre and arcane bird cormorant. Cormorant, my commandant. The confidant was the music of your hands when you touched me, traced a stone around my neck. Now there are cafe tables with bottled flowers, bluebells, I think, and baskets of bread and wine by the lake. There, perched on driftwood, it concerns the water again. The black seabird with its neon arrow of a bill, awkward as my grief and as omniscient. Once we laughed right here under a tree and everything thawed. We were drunk, fear was still distant as a father. I hadn't learned yet the secret knowledge of grief that one can yearn for the dead even more than the living. The curve of their shoulders, sweat on a cupid's bow, that perfect dent I know, or the miracle of an eyelash picked from below. Oh friend, I long even for the littered courtyard of an evening years ago. All that grass, warm and unconcerned with birds, your souls will never touch again. The next poem is my America poem, which I wrote in February. So the second month of this year and it feels strangely kaiastic to read it now in the penultimate month of the year and see that nothing has changed. And I eerily predicted the exact situations that I would be in right now. America. America, the footsteps of your ghosts are white stones waiting my center. America, the old girl's campus and the heart of Oakland where I teach grows quiet as glass marbles rolling between my feet. I pick one up, I say, it's pretty. And my students laugh, cheering, welcome to America. I have no one to look to this summer, I like a candle burn the proposably holy wood. And God does not come when summoned. Just the scent of bonfire in my hair and light flooding the bay window sure as a divination. America, I divine nothing. In the other country, my parents where their silence like silk ropes each morning, doting the terrible son. Day after day, I weep on the phone saying, even the classroom as a prison. And still my father insists, but it is good to become an American. I cement my semantics. I practice my pronunciations. I learned to say this country after saying I love. I rinse my aquiline face ring my language for fear. I feared what had happened near forests, the words that pursued the soft silk of spiders. The words were naturalized charge reside the nouns were made as alien hibiscus. America, I arrived to inhabit the realm of your language. I came to worry your words. What you offered as a vintage compartment and audience for poems. Pills the color of dusk to swallow so as not to collapse when I read the poem about my uncle. The reading of which I owe him to everyone who anteced me. No, I mean, who haunts me the haunting of which is a voice. The West is too young to be haunted and ex lover of the shores. Still every night I listened to your voice scraping my walls. And in the mornings I pick the spiders from my bed flush their curl transparent down the drain. America, I don't know what to make of my ordinary cruelty, or my newly bourgeois pain. When I'm lacing each crack of the historic apartment, when I'm lacing the porcelain plates we hand out the parties. In the hallway I let someone touch me under my mask, three fingers in my mouth. My back pushed against the door, the cold sink. The mind plays where it leads a dark hour, the weight of a body on indigo tiles. America, the scale says, not thin enough. America, my lawyer suggests to keep quiet about certain things about you and me. So I write in my notebook your name, I write the country of cowboys and fame. America, I have no cowboy, and I have no fame. The other is the scratching of ink against paper, the laugh of a skeptic. There are nights we hear something likened to fireworks, lighting up the campus, and my students cheer. They laugh, welcome to America. Later in the empty corridor, the disembodied voice of my uncle saying the classroom is not a prison. Go, go on now. And so I go past bedivere and cedar, past eucalyptus declaring the shoreline. Until I shiver on the blue stone coast on which my father once lay, and I proclaim what he did. I say this land is my fate. America, who am I becoming here with you? If I wander the same as without you, barely visible amid your indigenous trees. Thank you everyone for coming. And thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Aria. And I think I can speak for all of us. When I say that was a deeply, deeply moving reading forensics and a weaving. My name is Noah, I'm the coordinator with Jeffrey of Lunch Poems. And I'd like to thank the library on who support this all depends. And finally, I'd like to thank you all for joining us here this afternoon. We hope you'll join us next time for Use of Common Yacca on December 3rd. And you can see on the screen before you. We're excited to welcome the next calendar year, Kiki Petrocino, Mary Jo Bang and Shane McCray. So thank you ever for joining and other lunch poems and be well.