 So welcome everybody to another National Poetry Month event, we're really happy to have you here today. I'm Deb Moore, I'm one of the National Poetry Month committee members. And I'm going to put in the chat, a link to our website where National Poetry Month information can be found. And I'll also just show you briefly the, here's the National Poetry Month calendar, which you'll see on that blog website if you go there. So we hope you'll be able to join us for upcoming events we've got Pulitzer Prize winner, Jericho Brown coming next week and then we have the poetry contest week after that. The student winners will be at the virtual reception and reading their poems we really hope that you'll be able to join us for that. Today, though we have two amazing poets for this event who are going to do a reading and workshop. And we've got Susan Landgraf, who many of you know as a former Highline College English and creating writing instructor. Susan was awarded an Academy of War Academy of American Poets grant in 2020, and she is the author of what we bury changes the ground and the inspired poet which is a book of writing exercises. She was also the poet laureate of the city of Auburn from 2018 to 2020. Joining Susan is Celeste Adame, Muckleshoot, who has been published in the Santa Fe literary of you as us a journal of women of the world, and numerous Institute of American Indian Arts anthologies. She holds a master of fine arts in poetry from the Institute of American Arts in Santa Fe. So without further ado, I turn it over to Susan and Celeste. And Celeste, your choice, you want to go first or last. I can go first. Okay. This. So my, my thesis at I was still working on. And I believe I'll probably be working on it forever. This is a part of a crown of sonnets. I believe this is the last six or seven. We follow water at you another fog lifts, and you are not standing there. Santa Anna's have blown over gypsum from beyond Alma Gordo. In the deception past bridge I drop pebbles into canoe pass that flow to top water pushing currents into oncoming harem of seals colony of seagulls line shore. Barnequils nip at toes. Water freezes souls of foot barnacles attached to rock or you were asked and said yes. Before running past hours where we have fallen into sand buried in depths of coldness past hours where we have fallen into sand buried in depths of coldness. The hands become shovel cocaine fueled nights where hands emerge from bed sheets, or tomorrow knocks on the door, and only appears after she has opened it. Perhaps flavored kisses and hidden smiles frozen her glasses on my face. Her ear low between my teeth, gently her hands pull my face closer and oh God escapes her throat strokes match baselines of the old school R&B filling the room. She falls asleep with no clothes on. We will wake in the morning and ask one another name. Tattooed on each of our eyelids. I study her closed eyes her lips. On each outline of my arm her tongue trace the shading. Stencil placement between collarbone and shoulder blade. Ink deposited one sixteenth of an inch deep into space between our bodies. Fire ignites beneath mantle, no one around playing with the flames that become of your body collapsing into my arm as it turns into song. I have been humming without knowing these moments create thunder and bedroom. You and I find ourselves under blanket of constellations wondering which words where silhouettes become women. Some of whose names we will never learn which words where Silhouettes become women. Some of whose names we will never learn. Fade from out of focus. Turn lens on camera. Inhale all of you into lungs or you will sing into vessels and eventually make it into valves apart. Speak to me through typewriter. Your words tattooed on my eyelids. Glow in the dark. Eyes are closed. Thoughts as meticulous as your fingers examining every inch of my body. Admire all ink embedded in skin. We become laughter lost in smoke. We become laughter lost in smoke. Exhaled after winding in lung as long as we could take it becomes clouds parting ways as we walk away from the court. We're lost bottle rockets and broken brown bottles hide in wood chips apart. She and I play my eyes are closed from the court. We're lost bottle rockets and broken brown bottles hide in wood chips apart. She and I play. My eyes are closed. We're dribbles falter and laces are untied. We're grandma knows where to find us and any of the neighbors could open their windows and tell us time to go home. We hide behind a night evergreen to sleep beneath pine needles tattooing their stories into our clothes were lines of cotton next to silk rose to become you become me. Entangle smoke blow hoops through nostrils ball dances on court net sways with wind smoke salmon scent brushes asphalt. Rubber bands snaps on wrist a reminder to grab aunties left over roaches from Bach back porch sit underneath window looking at fence turn to you and speak these words. Flesh was a lie I spent a lifetime chasing. Let her be the story. I cannot bear to repeat again. How she chased her and I stood. Flesh was a lie I spent a lifetime chasing. Let her be the story. I cannot bear to repeat again. How she chased her and I stood there, waiting to be noticed. Some might hidden behind mountains floating above fog blanket covering peers of Seattle's waterfront. From shore of Lake Mescalero watch for the trout right below surface. And she has become baseline I chased through different songs and genres. She is hidden in earbuds waiting for me. Through silence I find her while sleeping. My eyes will not open when I see her in my dream I cannot swallow words quick enough eating after eating cans of alphabet suit. She comes tattoo beneath again. Right in front of me daily I see her name. She's searching through grace of shadows and ashes rising from fire burning through Cedar, another silhouette of us through through grace of shadows and ashes rising from fire burning through Cedar, another silhouette of us form bodies. The emergence. Snoqualmie falls chases erosion becomes life again. We smoke salmon in high desert at daylight, run to the plaza where we sit and write poems back and forth through one another through text messages of size. She will find my heart escaping. Orca pod gathered me on Elliott Bay. Each beat will release single letters of alphabet pigeons fly past in search of gunpowder used to make the firework works erupting. We arrive with the tide, mixing ancients with iPhone potlatches with podiums, hand drums with loop sample long houses with basketball court. iPhone potlatches with podiums, hand drums with looped sample long houses with basketball court. She came to the mountain past Cattails where she sat with me cross legged. She finally told me her name autumn. She took my hand and led me to the mountain where river begins with melting snowfall at dawn. She waits inside a bent wood box and Raven turns into a pine needle to be swallowed to impregnate a virgin to steal the sun and release him into the sky where animals will not walk upright anymore. We stand to swallow constellations and ride the river home. I will not let her go as I whisper these words. I find a border and imaginary line etched the length of her body. I trace with finger. My wife is my muse and she hates it because a lot of the times the poems that I'm writing are about her. Eventually this will be the poem that ends my book. Once I finally am happy with where I have it. This one is prelude to a new girlfriend, which is about a X. Right before I got back with the woman who is not my wife. One. Bleeding heart pedals rub stomach leave sent for her to follow. Ruby ring weights. Paintbrush sits in palette. Sky is uncolored canvas left out. A painter's forgotten masterpiece. Two. Way your hair falls. Meteor waterfall. When sky emerges from behind trees. Trails of Milky Way become river. Leading me back to where I told you this is emergent. This is where our story began to unfold. Water map in high desert. Like salmon, I will always return to the base of the waterfall where we took our first bath. To the lake created by man where you told me it looked like a war zone after the fireworks show. To the ocean where I threw the basketball because I did not know what I wanted. To water. Where words even in their sleep. Never stop flowing. This is where we sh them with purse lips and finger. Leave them counting. Uno dos tres. Become monarch before she walks away. Land on rubber band of her ponytail. A piece of parchment. And a dried up inkwell. A friend of mine were done at one point and he told me the night I was a boy for you and he did not realize it would turn into a poem. That night I was a boy for you. Everywhere watch petals become sky. A shade or two darker. The dawns are heartbreaking. A loud a moment. Me inside you. Sweat beads. Forehead. Back arch becomes. 3.9. Bed divided. Half time. 15 minutes off and. Petals drop. It's raining threes quicker than. Flat stone leaving finger. Satiates mouth. And more. You cannot quit moving. Satin sheets become warm ups. It's time. End of second quarter. Find some water. Sit briefly. Find hand under shirt. As for replay. On became become sound. Exits your mouth. Again. And this one I wrote for. One of my cousins who's since passed away. Or no. This was. About when my wife and I first got together back in 2002. Shots missed. The nets have stopped swaying from all the shots we missed. All the games we never finished. It all comes back to me. When I was a kid. I was playing at the backboard of my childhood court. If the hook shot I taught her. Did not shut the crowds up before hitting glass. Dropping in. Without touching the rim. If I didn't remember. None of us wanted to defend the Pendleton guard. She had a smile on her face. And it made us feel uncomfortable. I learned a coach wasn't lying. When I was playing. When I figured out how to spin the ball. Maneuver it behind my back. While dribbling between my legs. Dancing with you in the game on the court. It was the only time we could touch in public. Had I never picked up a basketball. Didn't learn the curves of your body were made for my hands. A poor dribble gets the ball stolen. I didn't realize I was taking the last second jumper. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. Celeste for being here. And reading and being part of this reading and workshop. And Gavin Rachel. Thank you for. Hosting. And doing all the work behind the scenes. This reading and workshop is supported by the Academy of American poets. I was awarded in 2020, and that's how I met Celeste was looking how to begin this project, which includes giving workshops at the Muckleshoot Reservation School through the Tribal School, the Auburn School District, and Elder Center to produce a book of Muckleshoot poetry. I am thrilled that Washington State University Press will publish this book and develop a portal for the Muckleshoot Tribe that will include the book. I also want to acknowledge that we who go to Highline, who live in Auburn, who live in any part of the Pacific Northwest, are living on tribal lands, and I'm honored to have this land to live on and to be working with the Muckleshoot Tribe. I will read eight poems about places I've been, felt at home in, or learned from, and it's a wide variety. The first four come out of my book, What We Burry Changes the Ground, and I believe it's in the Highline Library still, Rachel, but it's also available through Amazon and the small press publishers. The first four poems that I'll read come from that book, Sunday Dinner. I didn't think of pigs wallowing in mud, feces of the pen, pigs got filled with cabbages and slop. I didn't think of squeals, then barnyard silence, a dozen feet wrapped in white paper at the butchers and double knotted with string, grandma's stubby fingers whirring the package open on the for Michael table. The kitchen burbled with pots boiling things. In white soup bowls, jelly cooled a light amber around the feet, waiting for Sunday, crocheted tablecloth, creamy webs holding her china and silver. My grandparents' guttural voices mixed with pinging forks and knives and are slurping as we suck jelly out of the feet. More, more papa urged us eat. Grandma asked, did you learn your Bible verse by heart today? And my sisters and I chorused, give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you. I didn't think of the pigs. My mother's parents were both immigrants from Hungary. And there is a myth that the reason there are so many musicians and mathematicians that are Hungarian that actually they were left over Martians. So I went with that idea. It's called why some Hungarians dream equations and notes. More musicians and mathematicians than anywhere else. Too many Martians, not enough spaceships to take them back. The sudden exodus like a great flock of herons slipping through a blue lip in the sky. The gypsy women's skirts unfurled, the red and purple flowers and the men's voices reverberated like echoes in a well. Their stories flickered around the campfire. How the abandoned pocketed themselves from the sea and the moon's pool. They used scales as metaphors. Their long hallowed cups held the moon. They mixed with the natives. Finding blue bloods now would be hard as going home without a ship. But a thread holds the magnetic resonance in their equation. Their songs throbbing with a blue planetary hum. I only do deck gardening anymore. But for a long time, it was my goal to grow a herb garden. One of my dreams actually, and it came true. And this poem came out of that gardening time. Of arachnids, myriapods and insects, I know this. Segments unified under a horny exoskeleton. These anthropods know it's too late for butterflies. In this evolution, they're stuck remarkably with what they've got. Legs and a history of their ground. After the soil has acquiesced to being turned by the spade, after the bulbs have been planted, the roots growing down, worms wriggle up, spiders sashay over the dirt cods. And my fingers segmented to try to get a feel of the land in which I do not intimately live. When my husband and I first went to Santorini in Greece, I cried as we pulled into the caldera because I had this intense feeling that I'd been there before and was coming back, coming home. Santorini, volcanic cones sketch a dragon's back. Thera clings to the rim, white exclamations touching the kind of blue a hand gets lost in. After Thera erupted, governments changed. Men dying faster with knives, slower with envy. After daily hordes of tourists, houses and churches hold the hill with tomatoes, grapes, and the air is someone breathing. I went back again, and although I didn't cry, it was the same magical experience. And I ate at the top along the rim touching that blue sky and cried because my husband wasn't there. So this is a poem about my husband. What's left for Dick? I love what's left over. Sage leaves stripped, stirred into the stew, a green stem remaining, holding only itself. I undress the garlic cloves, garlic warding off evil, my grandmother said. The papery skins lived in a gust through the window. Half inch of wine turns my glass by the sink into a red prism. Five of the set of 12 glasses we bought at Ikea remain. Next morning I grind dark beans into a wake-up call. The cup you used to drink from sits in the corner of the cupboard. I've been going through photos since my sister died in January and thinking about the fact that she was the last person who knew me as a child and looking at these photos, remembering memories from our growing up. And these poems I've read after the poems in my book are new poems that have been published. I don't remember the last time I saw my father. Maybe it was at my grandparents' house, down the long driveway, along the little creek. With the raccoons my grandfather kept in cages by the barn. We asked Grandma first thing as we stepped off the bus. Is he here? Those days were blue-black, like the early bruises mother war until they aged to yellow. We were glazed from lack of a sound sleep. Our lives stitched between learning and recess at school and home. The word crazy was used to describe the almost naked man screaming up and down the street in town. His house was falling down. Our house had beds, tables, a stone fireplace, and blinded windows in the middle of a field. Our house was airtight. We were, my mother, two sisters and I, fully clothed, except when we bathed. Even then we didn't look at our bodies as we soaked and rinsed. In the few photos I have of my father, I can see he was handsome. Mostly I see him with his head bandaged like an upside down egg cup after he fired the bullet. After I closed that book, I started a new one with, if not a happy ever after ending, at least one bursting with color and light, violet, chartreuse, orange, reds, golds, and unblinded windows. We've had an interesting year of weather, but I remember one year when it rained, and I believe it rained like 100 days straight. And I put some of my frustration on the page. The year it rained, 50 days, 50 nights, earth, fissures, hills, slide, rivers, turn. The sun is a mummy. 60 days, 61 nights, windshield wipers burn their rubber. Traffic signals short out, tree bark wrinkles, crows give up calling. 70 days and nights, houses sprout lichen, mold, people buy artificial flowers. Their feet conform to hip boots. Their skin smells yellow slick. 80 days, 89 nights, we're trained to tune out the weatherman. We stop dreaming of baseball, blackberries, peaches, grapes. Television is our only transport. Views is below. 90 days, after 100 nights, ghosts go hiding. Children draw pictures of chicken little under a tarp crying. Art plans spring up like mushrooms. Lumber and nails have sold out. We stop praying for sun, start thinking gills. We pray for gills. And there is a website posted up at the top. It's HTTPS colon, two forward slashes, pardon me, phonebook.gallery. And it's a website that was created by Nathan Langston of more than 900 artists, painters, songwriters, musicians, poets from 488 cities in 72 countries. It's an amazing website. You can't look at everything all at once. Our colleague, Susan Rich, is included. One of my poems is included. And it's a very easy site to navigate. You just go to the website and click on artists. And you can go also to the map. And the map itself is an artistic endeavor. At any rate, it's an amazing site and do check on it. And then there's another website that's listed. There is a place called La Romita in Turin, Italy. And I've been there twice for workshops with Kim Adonizio. They've been having virtual appartice. It started about some 56 years ago as a Center for Painters. It's on the site of a 500-year-old church with olive groves and sheep on the other side of the fence. A magical place. And so the website is listed there and down at the bottom now. Thank you, Deb. And normally, I publish anthologies or individual journals. But I had read this for an appartite fan. It was asked by Alessandro if they could feature this in their newsletter this month. And so the poem is at the site under news. But I'm going to read the poem that is published there. And this was very recent. Self-portrait of My Cells with No Self-Pity. Begins with an epigraph. Be the statue on the dashboard. Travelling, hopefully. Kelly Russell Agedon. And again, self-portrait of My Cells with No Self-Pity. To be is not enough. I want to be groundbreaking, earth-shaking, stubborn, and visionary, like Muriel Rakhizer, who after a mini-stroke sank slowly to the floor, still reading her poem. My multiple cells must be about visions and non-apologetic when we fall short, bruised, and out of breath. I must believe in all the saints, the saint of strays, St. Mary, St. Jude, the saint of rats. Even if we don't believe in heaven, we know what hell is like. We must call out the king wearing no clothes, take the hand of a leper, grow flood victims to shore. We must be the statue on the dashboard. We must write our own safe roach poem. We say you are filling out food, but that we know you not at all. I reach, I touch. We must burn the coats of deceit. Thank you very much for coming. Does anyone have any questions? I haven't seen any in chat yet, but people can also just unmute themselves and ask a question or put it in chat. Sorry, I was joining late. I would like to know where is location of the place you live and your father's house you explained with raccoons. That was in Ohio, and it was a city called... Well, I shared my grandparents' houses in both Perry, Ohio, and that was the one with the raccoons in it, and my birth father's parents. And then my mother's parents lived in a town called Painesville, Ohio, and they were very near each other. Thank you. Thank you, Bezna. Oh, I agree with the comment that flesh was a lie. I spent a lifetime chasing. And the poems about the basketball court, Celeste, really visual and vivid. Yeah, my wife would be super red. Had I told her about this reading? Oh. Yes, I remember you saying she was shy. But they're strong poems. She's very shy. She's also a writer, too, so... But she does fiction and I do poetry. Well, that's good. Yeah, that's always an interesting question for writers and poets about when you include parts of your experience, your life, the people in your life, and then how that feels to put it on the page. So both Susan and Celeste would be interesting for you to talk about that a little bit, just how it feels. Do you ever feel maybe I shouldn't put that on the page? I don't know. I just think about that question a lot. I think that for me, it's... I think that most people around me know that I'm a writer. And for me, I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like if you're going to do something crazy or you're going to say something outrageous, I'm probably going to include it in a poem eventually. When my now 16-year-old niece was four, I was walking her from my mom's house down to her mom's house. And she asked me, she looked up at me with these big, beautiful eyes. And she asked me, she's like, Auntie, is the rain ticklish? And I'm like, hey, that's an interesting question. I was like, I don't know, baby. I said, let me find out. And she never asked me that question again. But I mean, when you hear stuff like that, that's amazing. My wife and I, we've drifted apart, come back together a couple of times. And when I finished this crown knowing that I had written it for her, as she was driving to me from Mescalero to El Paso, I read it to her. And she couldn't believe that I was able to write a 15-page poem for her. And I told her almost the whole book would be for her. For me, if I put it on the page, then it's there on the page. And I just go with it. Sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out what to put on the page. For years, I've been writing about my birth father, who was murdered. He didn't die after he shot himself. And trying to grasp why. And so sometimes I work out what I think is why on the page. But in the poems I write, I mean, if I feel that someone is going to be upset about them, then I shouldn't write them. Because if I write them, they're going to exist. I have a friend who wrote about and published her book a couple of years ago. Her mother was incensed and embarrassed because my friend wrote poems about her father that were not flattering. And she said, how could you? How could you do that? How do you know that's the way it was? And my friend said, well, that's how I saw it. And so I guess just going from what I see and trying to also recognize their sides I don't see, where those can take me. Thank you. There's a question that Sam put in the chat. This is for Celeste. She, Sam said, a writing couple, Celeste, do you and your wife collaborate with writing or do crossover projects? We haven't yet. Of course, my wife, I mean, to surprise you guys even more on top of my highly stressful job in writing, we are also raising eight children. So. Oh, Celeste, I didn't know that. Wow. I tend to keep my private life private. But we don't have a lot of time to write. Our oldest is nine. Our youngest is 16 months. Oh my gosh, Celeste. But no, we haven't. But it's also not something that I would be against the idea of when I was working on my thesis, I had this idea in my brain to write a poem in the shape of like a screenplay. So that was really interesting. And I would probably like to toy around with it more. I'm trying to get my wife back into writing, if not creating art in some way, shape or form. That's wonderful. And I love I love what you wrote, Emily. I was going to comment on that, too. It always makes me laugh. If you want to write about you better, you should have been better. I love that, Emily. Oh, I had a question and it just went out of my head. Oh my goodness. Does anybody else have any other questions or anything to add? And I'll see if I can come up with my question again. I don't have a question, but it's always an honor to hear you guys read. Oh, thank you, Emily. Thank you. It's a very nice break from homework. So thank you for your time. Well, it's amazing that you can take a break in that. And you should. But sometimes people forget they have to do self-care, too. I don't want to put anybody on the spot, but I hope some of you are going to stay for the workshop. We've decided that Celeste will do a workshop and I'll do a workshop. And have you write a poem per the prompt? And we haven't decided yet who's going first for that one either. We had a number of things decided, but not everything. So like Deb said at the start of this, we're learning as we go. It's just free flowing. Yeah, free flowing. That's what she said. So I think maybe if there are no more questions, that we'll take a break. And I'm just going to turn off my video and sound and be back just before noon. OK, so let's take a short break and then we'll start the workshop. Great, great, great. All right, thank you. Everybody hang out and take a break. Thanks, everyone, for coming.