 Hello. Welcome. My name is Noah Warren. I'm the coordinator of Launch Poems. Thanks for braving the weather today. Before we get started, if you could silence your phones. I want to say a quick thanks to the library who makes this all possible, to the English Department, to the Dean's Office and to Pegasus Books. Patrick is back there selling Courtney's book today. And so if you enjoy it, it's a really, it's an amazing experience on the page. And I'm very eager to hear how it sounds in the air. I'm going to be standing in for Jeffrey G. O'Brien, our director. I'm going to read his introduction and then we'll give Courtney the stage. So without further ado. Courtney Faith Taylor's first collection, Concentrate, takes the 1991 killing of Latasha Harlins by a Korean American convenience store owner to gather many things, how black girls and women navigate the forms and scenes of violence around them, the possibility of solidarity between communities of color, and the mechanics of intergenerational knowledge transmission about this difficult world. One poem ends, black women are a point that's made and it would take a very long time to exhaust all the historical thought and feeling concentrated in that sentence. The title Concentrate is similarly manifold. Harlins was mistakenly assumed to have stolen some orange juice but concentrate, which means to bring to the center. Also functions as a command to the reader, not to ignore the erased life re-represented in these pages and as historical method in which complication is maintained rather than simplified away. The book opens with a verse conversation between an aunt that's braiding her niece's hair and the figure of braiding announces the book's method. Within it we will find a calligrammatic collages, photographs, poems as Yelp reviews, prose poems all woven together into a braided history of a fatal event and its pertinence for the author's life. Concentrate is certainly therefore an example of documentary poetics expressed not only in its research and presented materials but in the hybridity of its forms which argue that there is never only one way to tell a thing but it is not only an elegiac artifact, solemn and sober, the verse is as witty as it is lamenting, as linguistically playful as it is furious. This tonal range is another form of concentration in the book insisting that all affects be present rather than only those proper to mourning. As the poet puts it, paradise and disaster are the exact same size for me. It's the kind of history only great poetry can do, proceeding not by linear narrative but via a drama of arrangement and adjacency like a collage making everything a center. Please join me in welcoming Courtney Fay Taylor. Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be here. I was just telling Noah that Lunch Poems has been in my life on YouTube for many, many years and so it's so special to to now be part of that archive. I want to thank the library, the English department, Noah, and Jeffrey for that beautiful introduction and for being one of the judges for the Four Quartet's Prize which I was honored with last year. I'm going to start, I always start my readings with this picture. This is a picture of me and my cousin. I'm the little girl on the floor. I'm getting my hair done. This was taken sometime in the 90s at my aunt's house in Cincinnati and I can't remember if I had chosen the cover of concentrate before and then came across this photo or if this photo kind of led me to choose this image for the cover but I think of the cover and its image as the first poem in the book. This scene of a black girl getting her hair done, it's such a cultural relevance. It's a loving act because an elder is taking time out of their life to beautify you but it's also an act of struggle because there can be pain and discomfort when you're getting your hair braided for a long period of time but in the end these two people have spent hours in connection with one another and I think of black girlhood as being made up of years and years of those hours and so as Jeffrey mentioned in the introduction, concentrate begins as this dialogue between an aunt and a niece that are sitting in this position and the aunt is telling her the story of LaTosha Harlins kind of having this version of the race talk, this conversation that lets you know the vulnerabilities of walking in your skin. So I'm going to share some poems and then I'm going to also share some of the visuals in the book and talk through those and just as a heads up, I don't have titles for many of these poems so I'll just jump right in. So far my sentence as a black woman has been hard to hone, homed in sore white pith. Put graciously, black womanhood has been a limb that's fallen asleep beneath me, patty wagon of spinal cords and Baltimore's traffic up ahead. This whole color was a mistake, a leak in the ceiling whorehouse, a confused ass whooping. You see the baby in the blinds, the eager run in nylons, a public school lisp making room for the valour of her name. I was one of them in grade school. It seemed my whole class had fallen asleep in front of a microwave. I drew faces on my galas then ate them off. God to me was my distantly gentle aunt notary, brilliant completely, Virginia slims and breadsticks. The shade on her side of Brewster slouched the coolish way a suburb deserves. Sunday she was an usher with one breast. I crept to mom and pops where bells above doors snitched to mention my entrance, but I told them bells. I was toys to be bothered. I had made such toyish mistakes. And any black sentence, you'd love nothing more than to have made no mistake. Instructions. In this part, you will be given a list of statements regarding race and health. Some of these statements are true while others are not. Please consider each statement and rate the extent to which you believe it is true from definitely untrue to definitely true. Whites on average have larger brains than blacks. I kept my eyes open when he pierced my nose just to prove I could watch this white man shoot me and not blink once. Black couples are significantly more fertile than white couples. Each time auntie pancaked a centipede to beige for scaring me, she'd go, mean old centipede, you bleed like me. My embarrassment still cringes. Serenading bout to be ghost seems a waste. A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you've set. Why sing at that? Whites are less susceptible to heart diseases like hypertension than blacks. I thought septum piercings were African. I thought getting one would make lucky dube and artery through my Saturdays. I survived single mother daughterhood and for that I've earned the courage to blast holes through my appearance. I've earned this bodily door. Blacks are better at detecting movement than whites. There was a time when children made a sport of sprinting behind me on my morning jogs. The winner was whoever caught up and slapped my ass first. Once it happened right as I went to wrench my undies from the crack, me and a blonde brushed hands back there right on the brilliant bluff of my brown sexuality. Black people's nerve endings are less sensitive than white people's nerve endings. Centipede is a delicacy, a sign of health in wider countries. But in the country of my hurt, a centipede can never be of help. I want badly for centipede to be a verb, to aggregate, to hone, to serenade the limit I've set. Whites have more efficient respiratory systems than blacks. Aunty's favorite stereotype is they're so violent. Not methodically, but ad lib-ish. A think on your feet type knockout. Though I've never gone to blows, she hopes that within me, somewhere along the carotid, my African-American inadequacy could shiv its acrylics into power. Black people's skin has more collagen, i.e., it's thicker than white people's skin. I wasn't mad enough to violence those children. Sometimes if I ran earplugged and vinyl layered, I couldn't feel the winner make a finish line of me at all. I tutor in the Center for Writing and Speaking. My job is to lend an editorial hand. The work consists of two-hour shifts, four days a week, during which I situate in a room bordered with the blooms and cows of O'Keeffe. I get 11.50 for every hour my assistants last. If someone especially likes my help, they'll arrange a weekly session. I meet a certain student Wednesdays on a love seat beneath black iris. Our mother languages make these sessions a tetris. For the 2-T, I suspect, I'm an oddly dark reminder of the English and the eagle left to earn. I've been detrimentally molded for my role here. Ebonic nicks on my tongue took long walks down rank MLK parkways so that I could shuffle like Cupid through some beneficial hinges. As a tutor, my job is to initiate that same vernacular evacuation in others. At our seventh session, I review an essay in which the prompt instructs her to write about a time when you experience culture shock. The feeling of displacement, discomfort, or uneasiness when entering a new society or way of life. She writes that while living in South Korea, her perception of America was tutored by television. White chicks sprawled like used parachutes on the hotel coast of Californian beaches. I think maybe Laguna Beach or Baywatch. Then men in the States, rock stars sharpened by Percocet and leather, incorrect presidents or fragile average joes. I think maybe DiCaprio or Cusack, the bow of say anything. But when my tutor arrived, she did not arrive on a beach or DC's foggy bottom. Compton, all naked of glamour and skyscraper, the south side, cockeyed, cockamamie, off-center, off-white. When I arrived, I was disappointed. Where was White Bay, White Buck, White Belt, White Rot, White Hope, White Cells, the White House? I did not know there would be so many Black people here. White trash, white wash, white ways, white flight, white night, white chip, white chocolate. I was disappointed to see so many Black people here. A timeline details a seriousness of events. As a diagram of occurrence, a timeline's chief objective is to show how past happenings caution and contaminate our contemporary sense of momentum. A professor may author timelines to teach what precedes and follows genocide. On the overhead, Rwanda is a centipede with its head in Belgium and tail on stage of the O5 Oscars. In our text, the Bottle League Massacre is an annotated string I spill grits on to suffocate the start, the blood count, the south. Easing on down the eastern hemisphere's lines of tying, the decline of non-white worlds may fervently thaw on me. It may dawn on your girl with the hypersense of tension that democracy is a phenomenon of withholding things, crossing legs, clenching assholes, silencing radios, pinning lips. But rather than events, I want timelines to detail a sermon of interactions. On my two T's line would be interactions had with Hollywood and so, interactions had with the American art of erasure. Likewise, on my timeline, interactions with Aunt Notri and so, interactions with retail. Between her knees, I received cornrows and corner store warnings. Tales of Iquas and Isha's entering shops without sensation. Hands out their pockets, hands off the shelves, hands to the heaven high fluorescence. Girls who know what to buy before going inside because we don't survive the browsing. Between auntie's knees, I shock while black. I interact with racism without having to have its trudges twerking the roof of my mood quite yet. My interactions with that imminent ism second hand. So, I'm drawing a line. On it, each tick mark represents an interaction Latasha Harlins and Suja Du had with Empire Liquor Market through the experience of someone else. Second hand horrors, all before the bell above the door snitched to mention their entrance on March 16, 1991. Director Heartbreak to a tick representing Latasha's Uncle Richard, who manned Empire's Register in June of 1990. Latasha, having interacted with her uncle, must have interacted with his working hardship. He was hawk watched on shifts, monitored on trips to the restroom. One day, Mr. Du even demanded he work overtime without pay. You're supposed to work for free. Do what black people are supposed to do. Uncle says, avoid them spots that stalk with mirrors and feet. Latasha could avoid some stockings, but avoid them all. Avoiding them all could mean a mean vitamin C deficiency. Though our professor says that Hutu and Tutsi were societies prior to colonialism, timelines say Belgium made these divisions ethnic, relegating Tutsis to erotocracy and seven-seater limousines. Though our professor claims that after World War II, our troops assist with Korea's independence, timelines emphasize occupation as Seoul's intro to jump in Jim Crow, soldiers' steeping beans for soldiers bibb to eat. Timelines prove the origin of race is oral storytelling. For race to work, man must tell a story that the fools recite forever. Aunt Notri read me the gluest eye, imitation of life, a thin novella called Passing. In it, a woman named Claire inherits no pigment. She's perceived as white, so side swipes the memoir of blackness all together. This comes to matter in her manner of marriage, of capital, dress, and revival. A similar mistake could have saved Latasha at the counter, or Renisha at the screen, Brianna in the sleep. For black to work, race must tell a story. For black to work, black people must be forbidden to leave it. Forced back in its shroud, Claire takes or is made to take a final step to shed it. For such a step to work, someone had to leave this arena to the fools. So on my timeline, I'll tell the foolish story Suja inherits. Before being empire shopkeeper, she interacts with the store solely through the cautions of her husband, his accounts of absent police, racial slurs, Crip threats, robberies, petty thefts at the acrylic tips of Iqwas and Isha's. Suja inherits his horror of black interaction, a fear that one night in 1990, wrongs a life. A black man witnesses a drive-by. He runs into empire for refuge. Out of fear, Mr. Dew forces him back on the block. Brother is shot in the head. We could avoid each other. We could avoid events that breed a white supremacy between us. But whiteness is intrinsic to all transactions in this country. Avoiding white power means passing away. This next poem is ecstatic, and it uses two visual pieces. On the left, this is a painting by the artist Roseel, and I came across this at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Fine Art in Kansas City, Missouri. This was in 2018 or 2019, back when the 30 Americans exhibit was touring the country. And 30 Americans is this collection of 30 black artists who are reflecting on identity across time. And Roseel's piece here reflects on the tradition of gongoro girls in Japan, which we in the U.S. may read as blackface, though some of the cultural nuances here are debated. And in my poem, I'm putting Roseel's work in conversation with the K-pop group, Bubble Sisters, who were popular in the early 2000s. And on the cover of their self-titled album, and in the music video for their single bubble song, they dress in blackface. This poem is a contra-punzel, so I'll read it three ways. Sounds like a docent says, indium style, so we sit electric on a birch church pew, facing a no-title painting. Untitled, portrait of a woman with blue view, bleach cornrows ending in a sly stone fro, tin Tabasco acrylics. She looks white to me, but her mug is slightly vandalized with the color I am. A placard to the left names the concept gongoro, Japanese fashion, girls wearing dark foundation, faux nails, tresses teased to the touch of fleece. When the artist came across gongoro, her opinion of it wore a deep side part. On one side, she was satisfied by this international black fascination, though on the other, every faux-lock left in fascination seemed lie-relaxed and flaccid, little tassel in the national rear view. Why the darkening of skin, she asked. Why do they feel the need to do that? I had to do something to figure out what I thought. I'm still not sure I know what I think. Bubble sisters sing their single on a yellow club stage, a three-minute performance beneath God and a seesaw of light. I'm in a funk over braids, nails, rollers, froes, bantu knots. I'm mad at all four of their faces, cork die alive. An act of blackface well intended, giving the finger to Eurocentric beauty. Minstrelsy, setting out to prove that K-pop stars could be unconventional with conviction, that K-pop stars could be unfair, unaware, unthin, unthem, but thoroughly talented, could be anti-stunning and stunned, could star shine and be clay nieces of mine. Over here we shall do go-oops, upside the head of any mocking fashion nations. When fascination perms kitchen and coons for bruises, when it makes scantrons of paper bags, the nigga delegation better ask why you feel the need to do that. Why that dank fit and drama skit? Why you feel the need to do us? We got to do something quick to flaunt what we threat. We still unnerved and unsure, picking at that scab over what we think. Sounds like a docent says bubble sisters sing their single indium style, so we sit electric on a yellow club stage. A three-minute birch church pew facing performance beneath God in a no-title painting, a seesaw of light. I'm untitled, portrait of a woman with blue in a funk over braids, nails, rollers, froes, view, bleach cornrows ending in a sly stone fro, bantu knots. I'm mad at all four of their faces, tin Tabasco acrylics, cork dye alive. She looks white to me, but her mug is an act of blackface well-intended, slightly vandalized with the color I am, giving a finger to Eurocentric beauty. A placard to the left names the concept, minstrelsy setting out to prove that K-pop, gongoro, Japanese fashion stars could be unconventional. Girls wearing dark foundation, faux nails with conviction that K-pop stars could be tresses teased to the touch of fleece, unfair, unaware, unthin, unthim, but when the artist came across thoroughly talented, could be anti-gongoro. Her opinion of it wore stunning and stun, could star shine and be a deep side part, clay nieces of mine. On one side she was satisfied by, over here we show Dugo Ups upside this international black fascination, though the head of any mocking fashion nations. On the other, every faux lock left in when fascination perms kitchens and croons, fascination seemed lie relaxed for bruises. When it makes scantrons of paper and flaccid little tassel in bags, the nigga delegation better ask the national rear view, why you feel the need to do that? Why the darkening of skin? Why that dank fit and drama, she asked? Why skit? Why you feel? Do they feel the need to do the need to do us? We gotta do that? I had to do something quick, something to figure out to flaunt what we threat. We, what I thought, still unnerved and I'm still not sure I know unsure, picking at that scab over what I think, what we think. Spooked by a slew of layoffs once, I bought a mini marquee to slouch against the top shelf of my cubicle. That sign was my first tactic to stand out in a slave's place without directing, standing, driving or smiling, as I hated doing those in war zones during the week. A second tactic was my wardrobe choice on Wednesdays, the days of our staff meetings. I took the little kiki as an opportunity to dress a way that roused a pubic interest. Kinte cloths, Ankh socks, Bantu knots. I was partial to the emblems of elders. Cyniglese twists, four siyaki ponies on a bungee drawstring, dark and gaudy. I felt I could not be removed. I spent weekends perusing the ruins of hoods, sticks and boonies in pursuit of clothing as foreign and unrelatable as possible. Some were holy and needed sewing or with sag so needed shrinking on high heat dry as I was at the time losing weight to be familiar and relatable as possible. My mini marquee posed the question, what are you pretending not to know today? A coworker emails me, sweetie, that sign. Best. Yes. Miss Tony K. Bambara. Cheers. Morrison. Best. Morrison. No. Tony of Queens. The obscene of Bed-Stuy. Cheers. She wrote about that milkman, right? Black and breastfed too long. Best. This the Tony of deep siding's girl of gorilla love and cheers. In the past, I've been even worse with first names. Now I probably got K twisting in some dirty burrows grave. Best. Past is a tender headed second line. Past a soft behind. Tony passed in some December. You called me Keisha in the past, remember? And if any black woman turned an inch in any grave, you'd feel Aries wait the Woolsworth counters between the pleats of police jeeps. Gods like Tony, I don't ever remember them waiting. Cheers. This poem takes its form from a snoops article. And I'd come across this particular one, which was that black people are most afraid of dogs, ghosts and registered male. But in the poem, I revised that last fear to CCTV, the form of video surveillance. So in this poem, I'm taking the format of the article, which begins with the claim as you see here, followed by the context and then its origin. And the origin section is where the poem really begins. False. Claim, according to magazine polls, the three things black women fear most are dogs, ghosts and CCTV. Two magazines, country living 99% white readership and ebony jet 99% black readership held surveys to see what their readers fear most. Country living's top responses were nuclear war in us, child dying of terminal illness, terminal illness of self. Ebony jets were dogs, ghosts, CCTV, origin. Stereotypes are centipedes and at ease in bowls of bleach, or liberation lit with wicks and then Katrina. That's a stereotype. When companies mixed, I'll pet king shepherds, adore mausoleums, suck my teeth and corner store cam corners, although privately under Nuval R&B and the tutelage of quickweaves to Chessemard and me counts horror on a matte black abacus. There is no fear on earth that has ever gone unhad or unburied, but the diaspora won't have it be known that dogs, ghosts and CCTV are a melody defining our cost, copyrighting our loss. I'm scared of saying what I'm trying to say. I'm saying I'm a ghetto scared future, beautiful and beauty is what gets hard shipped, mishandled, what arrives overnight, overweight, what was unleashed from hoses on the Jose Williams, what voted for tax cuts and sleep. As a 24 year old perishable feud item, how can I not fear cop dogs bucking at me in lethal language? Problem being I'm baby's kids with scissors when it comes to English. I'm scared to say what I came alive to say. Spooked my head will expire before my so deserving black ass can be worked into a purpose worth some acres and a heartbeat. Most noons I beg Orisha Oya to undread my scared, to sop up my morning with hot gauze, although I'll miss my washrag, stiff with soap, my stomach slick with sunny D and stage frighten mariposas. I'll miss dancing flat, roadkill flat, the plush yams of my black insecurity. Eyebrows like two jet burns above sight, and all night a Sagittarian Tony sitting in my throat, dog earring zane, coolating the cookout, coating her tits with shea, her cussing breath with citrus, so that dog's ghost and CCTV can be, what should I call it, a grove in me? Before I knew who Latasha Harlins was, my first realization or perception of there being any tension between black and Asian communities was in the context of black beauty supply stores that were owned by Asian American people. And so growing up, sometimes black women and girls would recount instances of racial profiling in some of these businesses. And so as a child, recognizing hostility between communities of color was very strange to me. And I think that's because America tends to frame racial opposition as a strictly white and black construct, but black beauty supply stores were the first place where I saw white supremacy operating kind of on this autopilot without white people physically being in the room. And I took this photo at a beauty supply in North Carolina, and I actually took it many, many years ago before I had even written a poem that exists and concentrates. So it's kind of proof that sometimes our interests are with us many years before we actually put it on paper. And what this is, it's a picture of the checkout counter. And if you look closer, there are these screen grabs from the store's security camera footage. And these are images of women walking to aisles, where to believe they've either just shoplifted or are preparing to. And off to the right-hand side, you can see the owners have mentioned the names of each of the suspects and the role that they played in the crime. So Taniqua is listed as the shoplifter and Kira as the driver and accomplice. And so to me, I think of this counter as now becoming this bulletin of black criminality. It's meant to be a preventative measure to kind of discourage thieves or to discourage these women if they were to return. But seeing these images as a black woman as someone of the same racial and gender identity as those displayed, I begin to speculate about the owner's speculation of me. And so as a black customer entering, I become the audience for this display and therefore the person being warned to some degree. So I took these images and I paired them with the lyrics from Black Korea. It's a rap song by Ice Cube, and it was released in 1991. And since it's in the same year that Latasha has killed, we can think of this song most likely written in direct response to that killing, but also as a general reflection of anti-blackness in self-central Asian-owned businesses. And when I first created this piece, I removed the stereotypical phrases in the lyrics because Ice Cube refers to shop owners as chop sui and oriental. And so instead of replicating that language, I had these open brackets where you were to imply that I'm taking something out and you could look it up on your own. Because putting them in the collage felt like reproducing the harm. But then later I thought more about this and the removal felt like a sort of sanitation. And so the words exist here to give the full, unsightly picture of racial opposition that defined the time period. In Ice Cube's song Black Korea, rectifying anti-blackness is a means of protest, boycotting, but also this idea of harming back for the harm one has received. In Concentrate, there's this other visual element I have which are these timelines and they're marking events that surround Latasha's murder. These are both events that happen on the day and then sometimes they are events that happen many years later that show the residual effects across the city. And so this one happens in 2013, so literally two decades later, where a rumor begins in the neighborhood that this corner store named Buda Market is owned by Suja Du, who is the woman who killed Latasha two decades prior. So some residents in the area protest the store. They print out these flyers and they enter the store and approach the owner. It ends up being what the LA Times called a bitter case of mistaken identity. Early August 2013, flyers on Slawson Avenue have a photo of Suja Du and claim this woman owns Buda Market, shop at your own risk. The flyers pose in Buda's window seal and arrive at checkout to work the nerve or in the work of baby girl's killer. But the owner of Buda Market waves a legal page, divulging her name, Annie Shin. Who? Annie, owner of Buda on Slawson Avenue, not Suja Du. Du is free, moved to the valley. She ain't around the hood to work the nerve of now. At checkout, you scream up the breast of Annie Shin. You minute made her blouses. When you bang on Buda's counter, you unbless the boats of entire people. We the people really something else. Our anger is the valley and guess who lives there now? Exume a name to drag it through enlightenment, pass the swishers, pass the lick, and guess that cost. Guess who owes it now? I'm going to end the reading with an excerpt from a long essay that runs through the center of concentrate called Four Memorials. And what this is is an essay that follows me on trips to various locations that are relevant to Latasha's life and death. And so I'm going to read the first section, which is my visit to the grounds of what used to be Empire Liquor Market in Los Angeles. While writing concentrate, I was often nagged by the hint of reluctance. It was driven by an insecurity surrounding my lack of proximity to the subject. I was writing about a city I'd never been to, fumes I hadn't witnessed, a span of years in which I wasn't even thought of yet, girl reluctant said, all you got is second hand. So I head to LA to handle the archive, to stand at the foot of every place I talk up, to earn the facts in their phantoms first hand. The epicenter of my curiosity is 91st Infigueroa, the lot on which Empire Liquor Market stood, Empire, a collection of states under one dominion, omnipotent premises, a territory implying power, and power implying those who die in the course of courting it. On 91st Infigueroa stood a structure, a system akin to a kingdom. Business never resumed after Latasha was killed inside. Vacancy made it a feasible target. On the first night of revolution, there were several attempts to incinerate it. But black residents living next door at the web motel stayed up into the wee hours, filling garbage cans with water. Living so close by, barely two feet from the store, they knew the fate of Empire would have also been the fate of their home. To save their own lives, they had to save this monument of brutality, our survival inextricable from the structures that threaten it. In the late 1990s, Empire signage was removed from the building and replaced with that of Numero Uno Market. This is the face that greets me now. Unlike the stone white dress of its predecessor, Numero is a pink and green shock to the street. I see a parking lot and a threshold in the back where trucks relieve themselves of cereal, seafood, juice. Inside, three officers linger by the leader sodas. I watch a butcher conceive slivers of meat. A child walks aisles freely, motherless, unhesitant. I make efforts to push my shoulders back but hesitate. I grab a grocery bag, eager for artifact. I hover at the refrigerators, eyeing a camera above the door. I walk around, consumed by questions of configuration. Is everything in the same place? Is this where Suja attended the counter, a gun her clandestine companion? Evidence takes imagination now. But those who love Latasha do imagine. In 2016, on the 25th anniversary of her loss, photos slouched against this edifice. Balloons ascended by the fence, dressing the hood in cool helium. On the sidewalk, a pastor prayed for protection, for wherewithal, for a heaven-eyed CCTV. Numero's sidewalk was also the location for an interview with Latasha's aunt, Denise Harlins. Denise helped raise Latasha. A duty assumed in her 20s after Latasha's mother was murdered in a nightclub. Denise took over the role of hair and heart care. Like many black women, Denise found herself swept into a motherhood necessitated by grief. The interviewer asked Denise if she ever got the chance to see Suja do in the flesh. I watched Auntie look up and off camera, ushering in that memory. Oh yeah, I saw her. I went to court. Was only one day I missed court, and that day I had to, well, that night I had to go to the hospital because both my glands were swell up so bad because I was out here doing the work. I ain't gonna lie to you. The work of petitions, politicians, protest, and, on the first night of uprising, assisting the Web Motel. Denise hoped to transform empire into a center of excellence for self-central children. All of her work, a resistance. And such resistance menaces the body. In resistance, we are at the neck of injustice, holding our breath, proving our matter. Resistance antagonizes immunity, makes us prone to roadrunner pulse. Epidemiologist Sherman A. James calls this John Henryism, theorizing that the tireless effort required to combat racial injustice has a direct correlation to the prevalence of hypertension in black communities. Aunt Denise died of congestive heart failure. You'd be a fool to assume the work of resistance had no part, no say, no hand. Denise continued. The day of the hearing, and it was probably divine intervention, my glands were so swell I couldn't go to court. And I seen it on TV. And when the verdict came back, I fell on my knees and I just shouted to my highest high. And I was angry. I knew the fix was in then. I knew the fix was in then. But there are no signs of murder, memorial, or resistance when I arrive. The ground is like any ground. Normalcy devastates. Stillness lies to me about history. Thank you. Courtney, thank you. That was a marvelous reading. And the book is really, really a masterpiece. I encourage you, if you're peaked by what you've just heard, to find it over there with Patrick. Thank you all for being here. As always, we'll be here on the first Thursday of the month in February, where we'll welcome Esther Belin. You can review this reading as past readings on YouTube, on our channel there. You can sign up for our email list over there. And we hope to see you in March. Thank you again, Courtney, and thank you all for being here.