 All right, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Angela Scott and I am the library assistant here at the Billie Jean King Main Library's Miller Special Collections Room. Let's double check, okay. On behalf of our Senior Librarian of Collection Services, Jade Wheeler, our Special Collections Librarian, Jeff Whalen, and all the staff here at the Long Beach Public Library, I'd like to welcome you to our newest online program in the Miller Rooms Spoken Words, Spoken Art Series, Celebrating Poetry and the Spoken Word. Today, we are very pleased to bring you a special Celebrating Our International City Poetry Jam with 10 special guest poets hailing from our fair city of Long Beach, with the program being moderated by a Long Beach native and Woodbury University professor, Mike Songson, a.k.a. Mike the Poet. This is one of a series of programs that will be featured periodically in the Miller Room throughout the year, in addition to a variety of lecture series on local history, architecture, and historic preservation, arts and culture, our artist workshops, poetry and fiction writing workshops, Miller Room Book Club, art programming, musical performances, and much more. Please keep an eye on our LBPL calendar and website for upcoming events, and we hope you'll join us again for more of these special programs as they become available. While we have you all here, we'd also like to mention some upcoming Miller Room programming for September. On Saturday, September 18th from 2.30 to 4.00 p.m., please join us for our next Miller Room Book Club meeting. In honor of our special September celebration of La Vida Latina at the library, we'll be reading the 1988 international bestselling novel and modern classic The Alchemist by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. This captivating tale is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago, who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried near the pyramids. But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasure within. Now the Miller Room Book Club reads a rotating selection of fiction and non-fiction books, as well as short stories that generally focus on the Miller Room study topics and special collections relating to the arts and performing arts, Asian culture and heritage, local and California history, libraries and archives, and much more. This book club is currently meeting online via Zoom and preregistration RSVPs are necessary. So keep an eye on our LBPL website at www.lbpl.org or our Facebook page for more details as the book club meeting will be posted on our webpage soon for advanced signups. You can also message me here in the live chat if you have questions or you can call the main library for further details. In addition, we're pleased to launch our next online arts and culture lecture series on Saturday, September 25th from three to 4.30 p.m. Entitled Making Comics with Atomic Basement, moderated by Mike Wellman, comic book artist and owner of Atomic Basement Comics here in Long Beach, along with a panel of other special guest comic book artists. For more information, keep an eye on our website event calendar and Facebook page for the Zoom program, which will also be posted next week for advanced signups and please stay tuned for other Miller Room programs that will be rolling out in the next few months. Finally, for all you poets and poetry lovers out there, we have a special announcement from our senior librarian of youth services, Julianne Malico, who would like to give you a special heads up about another big poetry event, our Youth Poet Laureate Program that will be coming soon to the Long Beach Public Library. So Julianne, take it away. Hi, thank you, Angela, can you hear me? Yes. Great, sorry about this little technical difficulties. Wow, I also can't speak at the moment. Hi, welcome everyone. I see some familiar faces and some new faces, so it's lovely to see all of you. I just wanted to give you a heads up. This is the announcement, kind of the semi-official announcement of our relaunching of the Youth Poet Laureate Program. Mike was a big part of it when we attempted to launch at the beginning of 2020 and we, like so many others, were came to a complete stop with the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine. So we are relaunching our Youth Poet Laureate Program for January of 2022. I can't believe it will have been two years, but we're relaunching in a totally different environment. Back in 2020, not many people had heard of the Youth Poet Laureate, but when Amanda Gorman took the podium at the inauguration of President Biden this year and stepped up there and radiated her truth and her power and her vision for our country, suddenly everybody knew who she was and that's when the Youth Poet Laureate Program really had a fantastic spotlight shined on it. So we're really excited to be relaunching in this new environment. We will be spending the next few months building hopefully excitement for poetry with teens in Long Beach and then launching fully in January with the beginning of the Youth Poet Laureate Application Period. This program is open to Long Beach teen residents from the ages of 13 to 18. We're looking for people who are not just poets but who are also engaged civically and are looking to make social impact in their community. So please keep your eye out if you have any young aspiring or flourishing poets in your lives, please pass the word along. We'll get some information up on the website hopefully within the next month or so and we're really looking forward to launching. Angela, thank you so much for giving me a little bit of time. Everybody have a great, great program. Thank you so much, Julianne, for sharing this exciting upcoming program with everyone. We're really looking forward to starting that up in January. And again, if you'd like to learn more, please keep an eye on our LBPL website at www.LBPL.org from our details coming soon. Now, getting back to our program for today, we'd like to welcome, it's our pleasure to again, welcome and introduce our special guest moderator for our poetry jam this afternoon, Mike Songson, AKA Mike the Poet. Mike Songson was born at St. Mary's Hospital right here in Long Beach and is a third generation LA native who has lived his entire life in LA County. He grew up riding his bike around El Dorado Park and down the San Gabriel River through East Long Beach. Following his graduation from UCLA in 1997, he's published over 500 essays and poems and his poetry celebrates Southern California history and geography. Mike has an interdisciplinary masters of arts in English and literature and he has taught at Cal State LA Southwest College and is currently a professor at Woodbury University in the San Fernando Valley. In addition to writing poetry and performing across the Southland, he enjoys sharing his gifts and talents as a poet, scholar and mentor with hundreds of young writers across Southern California. A number of pieces in his book, Letters to My City also celebrate Long Beach sites like Cambodia Town, Bixby Knolls, North Long Beach and Retro Row. Mike's essays have been recognized by the Los Angeles Press Club and he's published widely with KCET, the Academy of American Poets, Poets and Writers Magazine and dozens of other publications. We also have a number of other special guest poets joining us who hail from Long Beach as well. So I'd like to welcome and thank all of you for participating with us today. And Mike will be introducing everyone shortly. So thank you very much again and we're really looking forward to getting started. So finally, just one last comment. During the program, please feel free to type in any questions or comments in the chat bar that you'd like to share with Mike or our other guests, poets. For those who may not be familiar with the chat feature, you'll see a chat button at the bottom of your screen. Click on it and you can type and submit your questions there. Q&A during the program will be moderated by Mike as well as we'll have open Mike if time permits. The program will officially end at 4.30 p.m. We'll also be sending out an email in the future with a link to the archive video recording of this program so you can watch it later at your leisure. And just as a reminder, if you're having difficulty with your audio or video during the program, please let us know in the chat so we can try to assist you remotely. So thank you again for joining us today everyone. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the Miller Room is very pleased to present our very special guests, Mike the poet and friends. Insight the international city, elevate the energy, tell the truth and set my people free. This is the 562. The 562 is a nexus to suburban urban cross section, a small town, big city, flowing yet gritty. The 562 is somewhere between Hollywood and Irvine, Santa Monica and Anaheim. The 562 is a good time because its people are down to earth. Blessed by birth to be born where the vibes are warm, that's how cool ocean breeze blown in from the beach. And the clouds that come from the south as the coast winds around the peninsula, Palis Verdes, the temperature is perfect. This land was once marshlands of Willow, thickets intercepted by the LA River, but now surfers and grandparents kick it. The 562 is all American multicultural folks from Iowa to Cambodia, El Salvador to Ethiopia, aviation, okies and aerospace industry, and denizens of Long Beach grove, the Snoop Dogg and subline garage rockers and freestyle rhyme. And on the streets of Long Beach, you can find oil and signal hill. Broadway is alternative lifestyles, art in the East Village, downtown lofts and rockabilly chillers. And how many Pauly players on the NFL? From JoJo to the prospector, cohabited to the Blue Cafe, drinking sangria on a hot day. The barflights cruise from the 49 at a Belmont Shore, ferns to the V-Room. And private parties used to get loose at this blue scoots. The 562 is a window into the future with lots of history, like the powerful earthquake of 33, the pike used to be the place to be, and can we salute Cameron Diaz and her flavorful family? With respect to Lakewood, Cerritos, Belleflower and all while Cudahay, Southgate, Compton to damn your bell gardens. Not to be confused with the 310. This is the 562. In the middle of SoCal, but it's own little world, it's another beautiful day in El Dorado Park, in the place of my birth and in the home of my heart. This is the 562. Hey everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome. We are calling this reading, Our International City. And I was speaking with Angela last year and she said, I wanna throw a poetry event where we get a whole bunch of poets together from Long Beach. So here we are doing this today and we started talking about this almost a year ago, basically about a year ago. And so what we have today are just 10 fantastic poets that are all from Long Beach or connected to Long Beach in one way or another. And we got a wide range of styles and ages and just energies and all great people, all fantastic writers. And one of my very favorite things to do is not only host poetry events, but bring people together from all kinds of different corners and pockets. And a few months back, I did a poetry reading with Cal State LA and Michael Whitlow was on there with me and we had gotten Zoom bombed and I was on two other events that were Zoom bombed. So today we are fortunate to have Angela and Jade who are kind of our technical controllers. They're the ones muting and unmuting people. And for the sake of keeping things easy, we're just going in our order alphabetically. So we're going in alphabetical order with our poets today. And so I'm bringing everybody up alphabetically just for the sake of it made the production easier. So I'm getting ready to introduce folks here, but so good to see you, our international CD, we're going to be jamming until about 4.30. And if we have any room at the end, we may have room for open mic, but we may take it all the way to the, we may take it all the way to the AM, you know what I mean? We might have to call out the DJs and start partying. So first things first, we're going to go with our poets here. And I'm going to read our first bio, our first bio, she's great, fantastic. Aman Kevatra is a Punjabi American poet from Arteja, California. I went to Arteja High School too first. She graduated from UCLA with a BA in creative writing and is currently obtaining her MFA in poetry at Antioch University. She is toward the nation as a TEDx speaker, a national poetry slam finalist and a member of the 2016 and 2017 Hollywood slam team. Performing at a hundred plus colleges, universities and poetry venues, Aman's poetry is heavily tied to her commitment as an educator and an activist. Her work has been featured on all deaf poetry, button poetry, The Huffington Post, and the fight evil with poetry anthology. For more, follow her website at Aman Kevatra.com. So without any further ado, please give it up for Aman. Hi everyone. Thank you for that wonderful introduction and the warm welcome and shout out to the five, six, two. That is where I hail from, Arteja specifically, but I lived in Long Beach for three years. My family first immigrated to Long Beach before moving to Cerritos, Arteja area and dad went to school there, all of that good stuff. So Long Beach definitely has my heart. And I always say I can never predict how I'm going to feel when it's time to read. So whatever I had prepared is now just out the window and I wanna read you this poem with images of Long Beach and some white boy who broke my heart. This is called Salud. Has anyone been to Salud on 4th Street? Are we imagining it? Do we know? Yes, okay, great. All right, here it goes. I should have known better than to love a self-absorbed, at-building, hair-obsessed white guy. I'm sitting on a window sill of a just open juice bar we've never been to. Digging the black and white triangular tile in this place, it's fucking rad. You used to say I was everything. To be clear, everything isn't about you. This is a love letter to the solemn brick and the rainbow flags blowing in the wind. It's an adoration of the potted plants hanging from the ceiling and a nod to the neon pink sign that says cheers to your health. This is a song to the watercolor painting of a girl gazing. Each stroke a dedication to her gorgeous armed tattoos. This is an ode to the barista with the guava colored hair and high-waisted 80s jeans complete with a black belt. Long Beach is erasing your memory. You kept me as decor when I am an entire gallery, the intricate tile to your boring eggshell walls, the black human and dark red saffron powder that never graced the roof of your mouth. I am specific. I am far too resilient to be vague. If I wasn't already so masterpiece, this would have gotten messy. You would have woken up to a whale crying in your ears, sand under your nails, my laugh in your hair or break up the color of flamingo feathers, turmeric, retro graffiti on fourth street, our fingers pointing to jellyfish behind acrylic glass, aquarium of the Pacific brochure in hand. You would have risen to the haunt of me, my mouth delighted, stretched into a wide smile, showing teeth. So that is that, that's Salud. It is, you know, I've gotten into the habit of not disclaiming my poems beforehand, but it is definitely in progress, something that I'm currently working on in grad school. So I am working on my MFA. That is where I met the lovely Doug at Antioch and how I've kind of emerged into this community here. So shout out to you always. And I think I have time for maybe one or two more pieces. This next one is called When Job. And I wrote it a few years ago, well, more than a few years ago now, maybe five years ago. And it's interesting going back and revisiting work that I wrote in like a different state, definitely like a younger perspective and like breathing new life into it. So this is what I've been working on for a manuscript. And for those who don't know, When Job is like a Northern region in India and that's where my family is from. If the shop owners weren't speaking, When Job be so fast, I wouldn't have excused myself to the bathroom, enter panic attack, alone in the dark, trying to remember the words for too tight, bigger size, breathe, come back. 20 new fabrics awaiting for my approval and coffee in a Styrofoam cup labeled American. Mom drinks cha and shakes her head at everything. Rotion by tosses another suit into the mountains of silk and sequins and thread and stitch and ache. All I have to do is choose. That is always my problem. They don't ever say, you can take the girl out of America, but you can't take America out of the girl. I choose nothing, we leave. A girl with a missing tooth comes knocking along the car door. She calls me Bibi, which means sister and I stripped the English from my tongue. I'm sorry. Later, mom makes fun of me with her sister and I can only understand the laughter. My family here thinks I'm quiet, too shy to say I hate showering with a bucket and would much rather be eating pasta. I tell them so little, so they are wrong about so much. In my language, there is no word for love in the past tense. I don't know how to explain the silence that follows heartbreak. I don't know how to say there is a boy who could not pronounce my name with the accent of this village and I loved him. My fingertips are cold and I smell like tree bark and for this soap. I don't wear makeup or earrings or let my hair down. For the first time in my fucking life, I'm not trying to impress anybody, but I still refine myself. Try not to sound like a brat. I don't even know the definition of brat, but there's no wifi, so I can't look it up. I've only ever belonged to myself, but if I had any choice in the matter, I'd give it up to belong anywhere else. There we go. Okay. Thank you all so much for being so lovely. Thank you for listening. I'm learning that it's okay to not leave things on the most chipper note and honesty is enough. So thank you for listening. Amon, thank you so much. Give it up for Amon, you guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Man, we're off to a fantastic start, folks. Here we go, here we go. And it's only right that the next poet up is my man, one of my best friends, F. Douglas Brown, you guys. This is the man, award-winning poet and teacher and as great of a poet as he is. He's a great man, kind and generous. And he will talk to you about the daily examine and meditation that he can talk to you about some rare records too. Let me read you his bio. F. Douglas Brown is the author of three poetry collections. Icon is zero to three. The winner of the 2013 Kame Khan Poetry Prize selected by US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. He also co-authored with Poet Jeffrey Davis Begotten within a chat book of poetry as part of the Floodgate Poetry Series. He's been teaching for 26 years, currently teaches English and African-American Poetry, Loyola High School, Los Angeles, and All Boys Jesuit School. Doug is both a Kabe Khanum and a Kundiman Fellow. Was selected by poets and writers as one of their 10 notable debut poets of 2014. Man has been from everywhere from the Academy of American Poets, the PBS News Hour, the Virginia Quarterly, Bat City Review, the Chicago Quarterly Review, the Southern Humanities Review, the Sugar House Review, Curran Magazine, Muzzle Magazine. He's also the co-founder and curator of the Unfatable, a requiem for Sandra Bland and Quarterly Reading Series, examining restorative justice through poetry as a means to address racism. And when he's not teaching writing or with his children, Isaiah, Olivia, and Simone, he is busy DJing in the greater Los Angeles area. I call the man the champion of sound. This is my man, F. Douglas Brown. Wow, thanks, Mike. Appreciate you always. And thank you for starting us off. I'm in my home girl there, getting this started there. So I'm not from Long Beach, but I live here now. Very proud to be here. I'm in North Long Beach as Ben Staples calls it, the North North. As Mike said, I'm a teacher and we just started school and so I'm gonna read a teacher poem to start things off. One of the things my school really professes is this idea of called cura personalis, which is Latin for care of the whole person. And as a teacher, this is what I'm supposed to do, but sometimes I fail at it. Cure personalis. Sometimes I yell, and it's my mother's voice I hear, her tail end of the depression tone, making all ends link, no matter how far our desperation, then her welfare voice modulating as I give all that I have to give to the youth who sit before me. I repeat, sometimes I yell without care at the know nothing, know it all. I aim a stare at the boy who is waiting for me at my chipped classroom door. It's uneven brown matching his curly hair. Mr. Brown, I don't have, he starts as do I. Oh fury and fuss, oh vitriol, oh volume, and all the ways to shred a soul to nothing, what do I care? Mr. Brown, yesterday my father died, he says, and the door warps to dark dust and space between us unfolds to tears, enough to fuel a forest, enough for me to forget that the lesson of the day is the lesson yielding bullshit rules to crumble into the dirt. Somewhere the world in the world is a newborn or new love, somewhere a sweet song is playing the first tune of spring, all of it drowning anything I have to say or offer to this boy. This is called Obad with edits. Mike and I, we always- It's dangerous, cause I just clicked on it and it started doing some weird like hovering with the text, so unmute. Oh sorry, I guess my thing is we're unmuted. My computer is having terrible technical difficulties. That's not a zoom bomb, folks. That's not a zoom bomb. That's just folks trying to help us out. That's librarian trying to help us out. Thank you, thank you. Well, how appropriate. This poem is called Obad with edits right here. So here we go, an edit here. Mike and I, we ride around and we talk about like literary devices, normal talk for us. And this is a similar device from the other poem. We talk about apostrophe a lot, so you'll notice it. Obad with edits, both terrible storytellers both bad with the punchline too. Bad with the tail, short, long or otherwise. Both a little bit of college and plenty of experience. My parents, their hands hold on them and they're cooking enough to keep mouths too busy to talk, but not for lies. Gold-plated lies. Yes, still waiting for Jordans or a Walkman. Please, no knockoffs. No mom, not the fakes. No, it's not the same as the others, dad. Oh, edits, oh, tweaks that transcend trouble. You, neither fake nor fib, even when half awake in the new light, when parents revise stories or future visions. So a paycheck opens wider than my busy begging mouth. Edits, not lies when dad dies alone, broke to the bone. His version better than all the unforeseen costs death accrues. Edits, unheard requests or complaints from mom's eyes. Her last month tongue entangled, unable to spin or spin even a nickel's worth of lies. Oh, edits, the sun's up, cutting sleep and dream with heat and light. I do nothing while narratives move along the ceiling. Soon I will tell the lie to the mirror, to my shoes and ear and keys, to kiss my love, my wife goodbye, to my nosy coworker and to lunchtime and to the commute and home again and to my kiss hello wife and baby too, back to sleep and dream so my parents can visit with new things to say. Thank you, thank you. Hopefully one day we'll all do this live. Looking forward to that. Hey, give it up for F. Douglas Brown, folks. Doug just bought a real cool house in North Long Beach. I was over there about a week and a half, almost two weeks back and afternoon breeze was blowing and we were hanging back and getting a little bit of, getting a little bit of writing done. So I got to get over there on another Saturday, Doug. We're gonna have to do that again. One more time, F. Douglas Brown. Right, so I am moving alphabetically here. And our next poet, she's a Long Beach resident and I met her at a poetry workshop with Poetry Lab three, four months back. Kelsey Bryanswick, she day is a queer disabled bilingual poet and columnist for Los Angeles Poetry Society and lead collaborating fellow at the Poetry Lab. She's been nominated for push car prizes and the best of the net. Her forthcoming micro chat book, Bone Water is from Blanket Sea Press and her first full length book, Here Goes the Knives is for Moontide Press coming out in February, 2022. She focuses on her decades surviving scoliosis without any further ado, please give it up for Kelsey. Hi, hello, thank you. I was actually just at the library this week. It was built right before the pandemic and it closed and then I've been following those thingies and then I just, but yeah, I finally got to go and they have a whole studio and they have a chat book section, it's gorgeous. And yes, the Miller Room has a really beautiful special editions collection as well. So when y'all, when we're in Long Beach, make sure I highly recommend stopping in there. I'm gonna read one, I'm gonna try and read three, see. In Spanish, the word on my tongue is huesos. Like a whisper, un susuro. Hangs like the mist of an overcast morning over cold in a familiar coastal city, a home. The space under my tongue, un espacio, a pause, a translation stuck in my teeth, a rhythmic palpitation of my heart, mi corazón, con razón, with reason, the reason, reassemble like so much Ikea furniture after the move, a little loose, a little off kilter, a little misshapen, the shape of my tongue. Besos, besitos, neck cranes to be cheek to cheek, blowing a kiss across the bow and tilt of every greeting and embrace. The noise in my tongue is un grito, el principio de poemas, the grit in me that spits, twists and shouts, aims, takes fire. I don't just love amo, the taste on my tongue, bocadillos, naranjas, tortillas de patata, aceite, ajo y paella, chew and suckle, sizzle and sweet, spice adds heat. Las palabras sobre mi lengua son agua, me aguantan. The words are water, are water, to quench unyielding thirst. Oh, this is, thank you, kind of a jazzy poem. Street talk, sassafras, jazz, sweet tooth, sour gum, grass, watered intentions, tossed sideways, a crumpled dream, debris chewing off mouthfuls of the road. Tomcat scampers through obstacle course of elongated shadows, crisscrossing our path. Lone coyote waits patiently in the gutters as cars smear past, all headlights streaming to an iridescent blur. This moment and all moments are a confused moon. Not a quiet moment to find. The summer heat has been wafting up uncomfortable under the skin of it, sweating up the musk heavy night, gulping down fistfuls of water. And like the latest abuse, the world's din crowds in, pushes, fills ears with the heavy cement of the day's news. This will not be a pipe of corrosive tar sands running through our homes. The belligerent plutonium pit politics bulldozing through our future, our water, the confettied islands of plastic garbage, choking chock full of Pacific, ugliness bigger than a Texas ego trip, throwing a white boy tantrum. When a cold beer is offered or hot coffee, iced tea on the house. Just when you thought the well had gone dry, you find a clear sheet of paper, a back pocket pen. You draw a door where a wall had been. You don't know. Maybe the door is locked, but you try it anyways. And this is a short little one inspired by visiting my grandma, who's from Indiana. And it's summertime here is the humidity and August was her birth month. So this one's for her. Midwest summer bluegrass. The swamp water, the lotus, the green algae sludge of mud slick off-sleek rain boots. The frogs bloom as the warm salt humid winds roll in. Smell of rain clouds gathering. The husky tall lengths of grass. Dandelion, dander, tufts, whipper, wills and cap tails. A hollow gust through the reeds. There is a music. It takes lonesome ears to hear in the echoes of rushing water. The prism and fleck of back country river inlets. Thank you. Give it up for Kelsey. Kelsey, Kelsey, you're so right about the Billie Jean King Library. It really is a gorgeous building. And, you know, about two years ago, I was driving, I made a visit to Long Beach and I was driving down Broadway when I got off the 7-10 and I looked to my right and I was like, what is that? It's a new building. I hadn't seen that. I stopped and parked and walked and I was like, oh, it's the new Billie Jean King Library and I fell in love. And you're right. It's just, it is a masterpiece architecture. That green architecture with the big windows. Oh, man. A huge resource. There's just so much. Masterpiece. Yeah, yeah. And so give it up one more time for Kelsey, folks. Thank you, Kelsey. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And our next poet, I do not see him here. I am hoping he is one of the people behind, you know, the magic door, right? Do we have my man, Charles Clayton, aka Cold Peace? Are you here, Charles? We had talked on email and everything and then touched quite a bit. And Charles Clayton is otherwise known as a Cold Peace and he is a fantastic poet. Went to UCLA and also got his masters of all of each state. He is the booking manager for the Community Literature Initiative. I see his close homeboy, Tommy Domino. Tommy Domino is another fantastic dude from Long Beach who's very good friends with a Cold Peace with Charles. Tommy, have you talked to him today? Angelica, can we unmute Tommy for a second? I have not talked to him today. I didn't know he was gonna be in this show. I'm here with Christian. Christian invited me so I'm here to peep out him. So, nah, I haven't talked to him today. Tommy, you got a quick one you can do for us, man. Tommy, Tommy and Charles Clayton are good friends, man. You're gonna make me jump ahead of all these great poets who I wanna listen to and who I'm fans of. I see David over there. I see F. Douglas Brown, all these great poets. Okay, I'll do something real quick. Bluesman, I'm a blues man, masquerading as a poet. A mystic, ancient spirits come to visit me in my dreams. I've been conjuring oracles in my notebooks since 16, searching for meanings between 808 beats and soul ballads. I spit callous tales from the concrete where we walk, we run, we bleed, I breathe in sequence with Fleetwoods on caddies and honey gold laces and spaceships with baselines pulsating the songs like vapors and as we lay. I play space to set you not be social when things on this block go local. It's barely over two pieces and fades cause buck shots get sprayed around here. Bodies laid low over frivolous matters like curious stairs. Politics governed on project stairs. Like the staple singers, I'll take you there, vivid visions like D. Gowens, my poems, they stick to your skin. Like hot grits to owl green. Many of my peers have the queer notion that I would be a preacher instead of alchemist mixing lyrical potions buried deep in my soul's oceans. I see north stars. I hear Bessie Smith's voice spilling out of dive bars. It's me, Big Six, never speak long beach. Your favorite third cousin, flasful of gin, picking cotton out of my soul from sun up to moon glow. Toes blackened by the sun's persistence, my baby, she works in Mr. Charlie's kitchen. She sneaks me buttermilk biscuits. All I have is these beans and dreams and I'm constantly tapping on things in this field. Tinkering with sounds, cause I don't know what a noun is, but my heart contains a thousand songs from the boat. Cliff notes yearning to be unabridged. I'm a privileged to carry the griot stories. And I refuse to use your black only fountains and back doors. At the juke joint musicians play on buckets and washboards and I dip, I dip, I dip to the first and third chord. Yeah, yelling, yelling, yelling, yelling. Never learned to swim. Can't catch the rhythm of the stroke. Why should I hold my breath? Feeling that I might choke. Tommy Domino, you guys. Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, you know what you were here. You're always the great guy. And I couldn't resist myself asking you to do a quick one. So thank you, Tommy. And I've seen Tommy in every corner of LA from out to Dina to the time you came to a workshop I taught at the Cerritos Library. And everywhere Tommy goes, he brings that love and that good energy. So one more time for my man, Tommy Domino. Thanks, Mike. Thank you, Tommy. Thank you, thank you, thank you, man. Always good to see you. Hey, we're moving alphabetically and our next poet up has a lot of roots in North Long Beach and Long Beach State. We're gonna have Barnes and Noble on PCH. This man is a professor at Harbor College and fantastic dude. I'm gonna read you his bio, Christian Hans Lozado is a son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendant of a Confederacy. His heart beats with hope and exclusion. He co-authored the poetry book, Lee With More Than You Came With from the Arroyo Seiko Press. And the history book, Hawaiian in Los Angeles. His poems and stories have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review. He's a push cart nominee, A and U magazine, the rigorous journal, cultural weekly, dry land among others. And Christian has presented at the Atri Museum, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, California and uses his MFA to teach his neighbor's kids of Los Angeles Harbor College. Without any further ado, my man, C.L. Smooth, Christian Lozado. Thanks, Mike, man. Thanks for inviting me to this thing. So yeah, Long Beach, I grew up there, like North Long Beach Compton area. So the poems are gonna be about that. This is actually about how much I dreaded that overpass over the 710 on Arteja and then the underpass under the 91 had to go that way every day home. It's called Lachkies. My twin brothers, Manois, picked me up from kindergarten. We rushed home without parents from our out-of-district Long Beach schools. I was entrusted with keys or a bus pass, and Manois would test me on which buses I needed to get home. Laugh because I couldn't read the words, couldn't remember the numbers, couldn't spell Compton, but recited Long Beach with ease. Fall days, we raced the sun hanging above the freeway overpass and kept our momentum down into the dark underpass if there was meat in the fridge, an unbeaten video game, or new episodes of Americanized anime. Spring days, we crossed concrete bed bridges, reveling in our freedom away from any responsibility beyond keeping each other alive. This one's called Gods of the Liquor Store Video Game. Eddie's Junior Market Liquor messed up. They bought an arcade game, just one. Manois saw it as a problem to solve, playing without paying. They spent afternoons hammering coins and washers, adjusting widths and thicknesses, testing their work by slipping homemade change into the slot, seeing which were spit back in which were kept, tying change to a fishing line and changing knots. They learned nickels worked best, flatter with string, thicker without, but always flash a real quarter when you start or the clerk will ban you forever. Buy one loose, fun-sized candy before you leave to play four times tomorrow. They got so good at it, white mom and brown dad thought them us geniuses or video game gods, hours of entertainment on a quarter, four total, one for each of us. When they changed the game, the slugs stopped working and we had to find techniques to get more quarters from brown dad, nothing worked. Machines are easier to fool than people, especially when those quarters are earned by sleeping during the day, working all night, surrounded by a cacophony of machinery and meat from the dog food factories boiler room. When quarters cost you the ability to hear, you can give no more than four, even to gods and geniuses before you stop hearing their requests. This one's actually about fishing over there at Belmont Pier. It's not a happy one, but whatever. Trace DDT can kill the next generation. The fish were poisoned DDT, but we were too desperate to care. Brown dad brought us to catch, to feed, to fill the space between parenting and isolation. And the fish we didn't eat, we sold, always the best mackerel and bonita coupled with the poison. I wonder if brown aunties and uncles bought from us from pity, four latch geese, a black neighborhood and racist imagination, or did they buy from us from need? The first generation here grasping for home tastes and home experiences. Looking at the memory from my Spanish-styled windows that separate and silence the noise from that neighborhood, that pier and brown dad's voice, it's as if those fish, the ones we ate, the ones we sold and the poison, made family blood thin and brittle, but enough to move in all directions of a way from each other. And then I got two more, they're small and quick. This is when my brothers came here, they were six and eight, and because there was no ESL program at their school, they wanted to put them both in kindergarten. So this is what happened after that. The reason for the shirk. I grew up having to call my brown brothers Manoy without knowing what it meant or why they deserved it, but I knew it gave them power like a parent's because I said so. I grew up having to call them elder because it was custom. A holdover of a life brown dad tried to shirk daily. A holdover of a life Manoy had to shirk from their tongues. A holdover of a life we had to shirk before it was mine. I had to call them Manoy when they saw me as the reason for the shirk. For them, an anchor baby was a pair of cement shoes a weight that needed no title. When I grew under the weight of Manoy and all that it meant to them, I shirked it like I was trained to. But in that move, I clipped my tongue's tip that last sweet receptor that let me know what home could taste like. All that I'm left with is phantom flavors. The language on my tongue tastes salty like the ocean, metallic like force and bitter like oppression. And then- Christian Lazato, you guys, give it up for Christian. Thanks. Thank you, Christian. And you know, are you gonna do the bookstore in San Pedro again? Oh, I'm a Christian for a moment here, Angela. Not the bookstore, but we got plans to do some interesting stuff to like make a venue for readings and stuff like that. I'm trying to make something work, something interesting, but it's not quite there yet. What was it called? Read on till morning, was your old bookstore? Yeah, read on till morning. Folks for about, was it about three, four years? Yeah, yeah, yeah, like four years. For about four years, Christian had a really killer bookstore in San Pedro and we were doing a great series of events from about what, 2013, 2014 to 2017 or so, something like that. So yeah, Christian Lazato, my man, give it up for Christian. Thank you, Christian. Thank you, brother. All right, we're keeping them moving. We're trying to, the thing I was trying to accomplish was get as many folks up but still give folks a chance to stretch a little bit. So we're trying to get in that like kind of perfect little middle ground here. And this next poll we're gonna bring up, this man is Professor Compton College, David Mariyama, great dude, fantastic guy. He was one of the co-founders of the Amerasian, great poetry and actually Disorient. He worked at the Amerasian bookstore, was one of the founding editors of the Disorient Poetry Journal. And he was doing really innovative connecting work between Boyle Heights, Lamert Park, and Little Tokyo in the 80s and 90s, like 20, 30 years before, like, so David is pioneer and he tells me stories about things that, you know, stuff when I was still in high school. But let me read his bio. David Mariyama attained his MFA in creative writing from Long Beach State. He was a part of Azorama, the nonprofit wing of the shuttered Amerasian bookstore in the 80s, during the 90s to the early 2000s. It produced the Asian Pacific American Arch Journal called Disorient Journalzine and he was an editor. He was included in the anthology voices of Lamert Park Redux and he's currently working on a body of poetry, prose and essays to be compiled into a multi-genre text in the literary vein of Gene Tumor's Cain or Teresa Hakyeong Chadikti. So without further ado, this is my man, David Mariyama. Can you hear me? Okay, a couple of things. One thing, when I went to Long Beach State, I was in the first official class for the MFA program, the very, very first class. And my faculty advisor was Jerry Lachlan. So one of the things I want to do is I want to give some props to Jerry, especially since he had, you know, he had passed. COVID got him in between shots and I believe he was in an assisted living facility. So I had done some work and can't see the cover here really because it's kind of like embossed. It's something that's called city dialogues. And what we did is we combined writers with visual artists and then we had them to create joint works. So he collaborated with a guy named Henry DeNander. And I'm not sure if you can actually see that piece. You can kind of like see good old Jerry's sensibility there. And I'm going to start off by reading some of the, it's a longer poem, but I'm going to read the part that's in the painting. Okay. So this poem was actually called Keith Jarrow meets Charles Bukowski. It's by Jerry Lachlan. If you ask Charles Bukowski, as I did more than once, the secret to the power implicit in his simplicity, his only reply was always, you've got to just lay down the line. Now, however, I hear the answer, the musical equivalence and Keith Jarrow's keyboard playing on the melody at night with you. That's good old Jerry. I'm going to read, I tend to write long poems and this thing, it was actually a result of stuff that I've been watching on in news, but also it came through a conversation with a friend of mine who's actually online, Professor Brian Doan, Long Beach City College photographer here. So go Long Beach City. Okay. So this piece is actually called force migrations. So a different light began. Mike knows this. I do these things, which I call quick and dirty things. So this thing was, it's not technically really finished, but I just stopped working on it about an hour ago. So the title was force migrations. So a different light began for Brian. Part one, 1942, Little Tokyo, where art thou? By executive order 9066, Japanese-Americans were gathered in Little Tokyo. Nisei children were forced to get on a bus to San Anita racetrack horse stables. Nisei parents wondered if everything was lost. Little Tokyo emptied, Bronzeville opened. Nisei sons joined the army and fought the Nazis, but returned to barb wire fences on leave. Amachi, Gila River, Hart Mountain, Jerome, Manzanar, Minidoka, Poston, Rower, Topaz, Tula Lake, America. Can Nisei come back? Only as a gardener, my friend. What about the farm sold it to someone else? Nancy Sekizawa's punk rock atomic cafe is gone. Demolished to build rail, which was demolished to build freeways. Starbucks is in Little Tokyo. America, the life they left no longer existed so a different life began. Part two, 1975, Saigon, excuse me, where art thou? White Christmas played on the radio. Saigon had fallen. People climbed up slatters and boarded Air America Hueys. Another man hung off a helicopter in Da Nang. He lost his grip and fell. Chapters were thrown off carrier decks. Tanks rolled up to the presidential palace. Afterwards, re-education camps grew as Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. Home became Camp Pendleton. Home became Little Saigon. The left behind Vietnamese children became boat people languishing at sea, women raped by pirates. Men without money were killed. Survival was uncertain. Malaysia, Hong Kong, Philippines, Thailand, America, Vietnamese women wondered what to do. They liked the nails of the actress in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Tipi Hadran decided to sponsor lessons on doing nails. Vietnam, the nation they left no longer exists so a different life began. Part three, 2021, Kabul, where art thou? Kandahar is lost. Refugees flee carrying lost memories. Women are beaten if their ankles show. Kabul falls in days next. Families gathered by the Kabul airport. People cling to military transports. Some freeze in the air. Waiting by the gates, families are blown up. Women hide in homes. They wonder why America left. Those with the golden ticket fly to Uzbekistan, to Oman, to Germany, fly to Paris, fly to South Korea, fly to America. Will little Kabul and Fremont grow? Afghan, all girls robotics team landed in Mexico. They could program robots to build a bridge over walls. Afghanistan, the nation they grew up in no longer exists. They may never go back. So a different life begins. Part four, impermanence. Existence is temporal. Nations are temporal. Life is temporal. Every day must be kept as a good day. A different life might begin for you. That's it. Hey, that's David, that's David Mariam. Give it up for David, you guys. Man, David is always a thoughtful guy and he's been doing some really incredible programming at Compton College. He's had Quincy Troupe. He had Father Omdi Hamilton from the Watch Profits. He had Ojenke, who was one of the original of the Watchwriters Workshop. And David is just doing a lot of really incredible work. And David and I talk about this idea. I love it. He told me about the quick and dirty, where you just write from your heart. And you might go back and edit it a little bit later, but I mean, I think what he did was pretty, was right on the money. And sometimes we labor over our work. I want to get it just right, but David always talked to me, hey man, just come out of your heart and just write. We'll get it out and go and don't overthink it. And David, thank you again, man. Give it up, give it up for David Mariamma. And David and I have talked a lot about, I've been doing an ongoing history of Los Angeles poetry and David's talked a lot about Disorient Magazine and some of the work he was doing, connecting Pam Ward and Amy Umatsu and different factions of LA poetry in the late 80s, early 90s, as I said, between Limerick Park, Boyle Heights, Little Tokyo, Gardena, South Bay, Long Beach. And so David is a one man. Give it up for David Mariamma. Thank you, David. Thank you, bro. All right. You know, our next poet up, alphabetically we're gonna go, and then my man of cool pieces here, so we're gonna come back to you. Charles Clayton is here. So fantastic, we are gonna get Charles up and I'm so glad he made it. Is my man Kevin Ridgway here behind any of the magic doors? Sometimes somebody's behind the door. Kevin Ridgway, you guys, is a fantastic dude and he's always getting published in these crazy journals that I never heard of like Nerve Cowboy and San Pedro River and Cape Rock and Traylor Park Quarterly and all kinds of stuff. But Kevin Ridgway is a hilarious poet. He's got this piece about the time his neighbors got in a fight over an Amazon package and I was hoping Kevin was gonna make it. Is Kevin here anywhere, Kevin Ridgway? Okay, okay. Well, Kevin is not with us, but Kevin Ridgway is a fantastic poet and a good dude. And so Kevin, I'm sending you energy wherever you're at, brother. Kevin Ridgway, I love his, he's got these little slice of life poems that are always cool. And all right, well, you know what? Our next poet up, this woman, I call her the Queen of Long Beach. I mean, she is Long Beach, you know. She's actually on a mural in North Long Beach right now at Houghton Park and she performed in the Uptown Jazz Festival in North Long Beach and singer-songwriter poet, she hosts a bunch of events and she and I both did a poetry workshop for the We The People High School on Long Beach Boulevard in May. It was actually my first in-person gig about over a year. She's known as Shy But Fly. Let me read her by Shy But Fly is a singer, writer, poet based in Long Beach, California. Shy has hosted open mics such as Gariot Cafe, Roxanne's, First Fridays would never speak poets, along with poetry. Shy fronts a blues band and she performs weekly. She performs probably three times, she probably performs two, three times a day. She might be performing later tonight. This woman is everywhere. Check out our events at ShyButFly.com and check out our book on Amazon, Meaning of the Blues. Without further ado, Ms. Shy But Fly. Hi, this is Jade, her example name. Shy But Fly, are you a high member of different names? I can ask you to unmute if you are, if you can put it in the chat box for me. She was here earlier as Shy. Yeah, I saw her on here earlier, but I don't see her normal. Oh, oh, you know what? She just texted me, be right back. Sorry, technical difficulties. Oh, okay. Okay, well, you know what? This is what we'll do. My man, a cold piece is here. Charles Clayton, we'll have Charles go and then have Shy go right after Charles. Guys, let me read this man's bio. Charles Clayton has got a great AKA, a cold piece, but the man rocks cold pieces. I'm gonna read his bio. Let me hit you with his bio. He's on my other page. Charles Clayton is a father, educator, writer, poet, spoken word artist and a host. He is a graduate of UCLA and he's inspired by the legacy of his father and the future for his side. Which a cold piece, which he's called by many continues to embrace the unknown, where he finds solace in knowing that the unknown and uncomfortable is where true growth resides. He's a published author of the book called The Weather Report, a book of Haiku and what he calls myku. He has also become a well-respected host for his ability to leave his friendly demeanor and humor in his stage time. I've had him as a guest speaker in my class and he always brings it compassion. He's a well-rounded cat. Give it up for my man, cold piece. Greetings, everyone. Greetings, forgive my tardiness. I helped take care of my 75-year-old mom and she had an accident, so just had to get that together before I came in. So I'm just gonna open up. My book is The Weather Report. The Weather Report, like Mike the poet said. I'm gonna give you a couple of these myku's. You know, Haiku's the standard 575 about nature. Myku, I change up the orders and I write about everything. I've been a teacher for a very long time, so a lot of my Haiku are about my students or just things I've experienced in life. So this one is called Choices. Condoms and hearts. Either one of these break, shit just got real. So let me get into this poem. I like what David was talking about, just writing. I had an incident with a former friend and it just went bad, so I just wrote it from my heart. Never edited, just kept going and it's called Frenemy. I was gonna write a poem about you and how you betrayed me. I mean, initially, I was gonna disturb your peace, but since I know who you are and I know you don't have any, I mean you are in pieces, broken, haunted by demons or just one, alive and well. Well, at least in your mind. Mind you that every interaction you have reminds you of your shattered, scattered memories of your broken reality really keeps you off balance, balancing passive aggressive behavior, behaving childish, out there being triggered happy. Your crosshairs target anyone that make you feel unworthy. Your feelings are valid, they're just not true. What I said and what you interpreted was not the same, but do you? You would never find a friend like me. Thank you. So this poem right here, Blue Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter, I'm wondering if that includes the crypts. Just saying, our uniform is blue too. Your shield and my flag are both worn on the left side. We implement the blue wall of silence, the blue coat and the blue shield. Our squad needs to be filled with donuts before we hit the streets. I'm gonna be real honest with you. I fear for my life just like they do. The homies do too. But because of this game, it's the lifestyle they wanna admit it, nah, not me. I'm a rational crypt. I really don't wanna die, especially for the set, but I act like I do. You feel me? We got enemies though, the Bloods and the Polis. Both them trying to kill us, one legally and the other illegally. I just wanna know, when the Bloods do a drive-by, do I, as a Blue Lives Matter comrade, get the bus back on them first? Again, I fear for my life. See, as a young and I was told, they were super predators, they're animals. So I have the right to do what's ever necessary to take them out. I mean, I was born a crypt. Moms put me in the blue onesie at birth. Swallow me in a blue rag. This wasn't a chosen occupation. It's my birthright. I'm just policing my neighborhood. You never heard anybody saying defund the crypts. Community, revolution and progress. The difference between a cop and a crypt is we actually know we're a gang. Blue Lives Matter, the real ones. And then for my last one, me and my wife have been writing a lot of poems together. And so this is one that we haven't done ever. We just kind of wrote it. And she has a part and I have a part and it's on the Seiku Sundiata blink of an eye. So kind of like a remix. I was on my way home to see my wife, but the Cyrus said I was breaking the law. A suspect, driving while black. I mean, nigger and criminal, synonyms. Adjectives to them. A description that I fit will never describe me as human. He approached me like I was prey. This month, he already met his murder quota. Wait. Adjectives to them. A description I fit will never describe me as human. He approached me like I was prey. And I pray this month, he already met his quota of murder. All I can think of is my woman waiting. If you see my woman, you would understand my excitement. Wrapped in Nutella, dimples, brown eyes, brains, beauty and booty. Thicker than frozen peanut butter sexy. And our children are gone for the weekend. My woman is waiting. I know she's worried. I'm never late, especially when our children are gone for the weekend. He said it was routine. It felt more like lynching. My internet turner was seeping through my pores. The overseer asked me why I was sweating. He didn't know a few seconds away. I was, he didn't know I was a few seconds away from a South Hampton insurrection. All I can hear her say is relax, relax. Cause it's never about the car or how loud the music is. The tail light wasn't out. The speed limit wasn't max. There's always a suspect, a description. He feared for his life, my wallet, that's not a gun. Just being black, it's about the skin. It's about the skin I'm in. It's about the skin. It's about the skin we're living in. Thank you. Hey, Charles Clayton always rocks a cold piece. Give it up for my man. Hey, KP, always good to see you, man. Thank you, bro. Likewise, likewise, likewise. Charles also works with the Community Literature Initiative and just does a lot of great work around the city and it's very connected to poetry. And we both also taught at the same high school, a few years apart, but we both taught at View Park High School and he's been a guest speaker of mine at Southwest College. He was a guest speaker in my class at Woodbury University. So we cross area codes and always have a good time jamming. So one more time for my man, a cold piece. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate you. Thank you for putting this on. Oh, thank you, man. I appreciate you. All right, folks, our next poet. I met her when she was finishing her master's at Long Beach State about four or five years back. I was a guest speaker in a Professor Bill Mars class at Long Beach State and she's an award-winning poet and teacher and just a really cool person and a Long Beach native. I'm gonna read her bio. Alexandra Moonless teaches ninth and 10th grade humanities and is a lecturer at Golden West College. She is currently serving on the 2021 screening committee for the Kingsley and Cape Tufts Poetry Awards and she's the author of the poetry collection at the table of the unknown, Moon Type Press. Give it up for Alexandra Moonless. Thanks, everyone. Yeah, I moved to Long Beach when I was three. I went to Los Cerritos Elementary School, Hughes Middle School, Long Beach Poly High School. Home of Scholars and Champions and Taosay Long Beach for my MFA. Being here has made me pretty emotional today and I was thinking a lot about Long Beach and about my childhood and how Long Beach really gave me an education and love and how much I appreciate that. This last few years have been hard. I have not been writing and I tried again this morning because I was like, I wanna read something new. I'm tired of reading all the same things and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't and I think I need to be out in the world again and listening to everybody here today has really shown me that. So thank you all for your words and for what you do and for being a part of Long Beach and all of its wonder. I'm gonna read a poem for all the teachers out there because as teachers especially, I think the last two years have been really tough and this is for one of my students named Victor who committed suicide when he was my high school student and it's a villainel for Victor. We studied Shakespeare, writing, parts of speech. You sat in the first row across three down the empty seat and I'm supposed to teach. You played in the school's band and loved the beach last week but now we're here and glances drown your seat. Grief also is a part of speech. So as a teacher, what is in my reach? Is this? I covered adjective and noun. It's been three days and I'm supposed to teach. I don't want Desdemona to beseech Othello for her life and then his round as he ignores her desperate pleading speech. My students hold their breath. His hand, a leech, arrests her life as she lies in her gown and this today is what I'm supposed to teach. The clock hands tick. It's quiet now and each of us remembers quiet as your crown. We study Shakespeare, writing, parts of speech but I can't speak and I'm supposed to teach. I just, I think it's been a little bit of a wake up call these two. Like I know I teach differently now. Like I teach, I always think like, is this really what's important? Like what's really important? And we're asked to teach so many things that aren't that important and it takes up so much time from the time we could be taking to teach the things that are important. So when you do teach the things that are important it's like you're giving your heart, right? And it's exhausting. So gotta keep doing it though. I wrote this for my daughters when I realized both with just the tiniest bit of maybe nostalgia but also I was really happy that they would never have to take home economics which I still remember taking at Hughes Middle School and it's my daughters will never know. The joys of home economics. The room full of do-gooders, helpers, sowers piecing together pillowcases and aprons, smiling with roses in their cheeks with soft hands and sugared smiles. My daughters will not be taught how to decorate a table, will not suck in their bellies with books on their head, shoulders pressed back with the possibilities of marriage and musical notes spun from kitchens. They will not learn how to clean up after cooking bacon to pour a curling ribbon of soap into the hot pan to wet paper towels and throw them steaming into the sizzle of grease. How will they survive? Who will tell them how to avoid the steely prick of needles? How will they protect themselves from the slick jaws of fabric shears? Both are aware their limbs belong to them. Both know they are their own canvas. They cannot be adorned. They are the flowers and the lace. And I think I'm going to just end with those two, but thanks Mike, thanks Angela, thanks Jade for doing this. It means a lot to me. Alexander Ulmas, hey, thank you Alexander. Always good to hear you, beautiful job. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The Villanelle for Victor and I love Villanelles and you just, you went and show your Tani on it. You really did it, you did a really beautiful job. So thank you, thank you Alexander. Man, man, you guys are making me emotional over here. What a good day, I really needed this myself. It's here and everybody is one of the most satisfying things ever and our next poet is fantastic. I met him a few months back at Cal State LA at a reading and he's a professor at Long Beach State and let me read his bio. Michael Langford Whitlow, after his 31 year career as a writer and creative director and advertising, Michael Langford Whitlow published two books of poetry, Concrete Fields and Ferris Wheels while earning an MA in English literature at Cal State LA. He teaches concept development and creative writing as a tenured professor at Cal State Long Beach. He recently completed his first book of nonfiction titled Under My Black Skin, a memoir written in a collection of essays about growing up as a black man on the south side of Chicago. The book is represented by the Catherine Green Literary Agency in New York City. He lives in Long Beach and Ida White, California but considers home to be wherever he can feel most himself. Give it up for my man Michael Whitlow, you guys. Thank you Mike, how's the volume? Is it okay? Okay, first of all, man, thank you for having this. Thanks for asking me. Like Mike said, I teach at Cal State Long Beach but I've spent way too much time on campus and not gotten out in Long Beach, man. There's a lot going on with you guys. I'm really excited to be a part of it. I sort of abandoned a couple of points I was gonna read because I said, oh man, I'm not a Long Beach guy. I'm a south side guy. So word is south side t-shirt but I can't fake the funk. It's not south side Long Beach, it's south side Chicago. South side, that's south side. But I do love Long Beach and I have written a couple of things that were motivated by my time in Long Beach, right? And I do live down here. So I read the first one. When I first started teaching, my students and I did a big project, did a big art and creative project for the homeless, a couple of homeless shelters down here. And one was a women's shelter, the Lydia House. And the guys at school, including me, couldn't go across the street to visit the women. It was a very private thing and only women could go over there. And some women had kids and we find out later that if they had a boy or a male at, when they reached a certain age, they had to leave. Either they would leave on their own as if they were a man or the mom had to leave with a child because at 13, they were considered males, predatory adult males. And I said, well, what a loss of venison. So I wrote this poem, it's called 13. Inside each boy, there's a lighted temple, a flame that reaches far beyond his eyes, eternal and lasting. Unlike a pimple that rises with conviction and then dies, a foreign revolutionary ploy. Here at the women's shelter, you can see that light inside a 13-year-old boy, fading like blossoms from a cherry tree. His river is freezing over as he dreams of hide and seek and pulling ponytails and hearing sudden streaks with distant screams of children who eat shooting stars and snails, who for a moment suspended in time, was just like other kids, before the clock turned him into a man. Nature sublime, now struck upside his head like some big rock, only 13, he has to leave the shelter. So terrified, he's grown into a vine who looks and acts like something, helter-skelter, but was created just like Frankenstein. Thank you. Another, this is a newer poem that during the pandemic, it affected me like it did all of you. And while the negativity that is and was a part of that, there's a flip side, a B side to that album, right? And it made me look at one of our institutions in Long Beach in a positive light. So there's always another side to it. And that was the post office, right? Which is, if you can look at the post office of a different life, you know, pandemic has done something good. So this poem is called, Gone Fishing. Each time I walk in, the place just feels old. The technology, what there is of it, sits idle and out of breath. The walls are as dull as midday, painted some shade of white that I don't recognize. The building itself appears forsaken as an abandoned warehouse might, where time forgot to shut off the lights. At this particular branch of the post office, the wait always seems longer than it should be. All the people here, all the people working here take on the vibe of the place and move in slow motion. They don't seem in much of a hurry to do anything. Some days though, I feel in sync with their movements and I think to myself, hmm, what's so wrong with that? The world could stand a bit more of this to slow and take it down a notch, to receive things as they arrive, as spring arrives in time to thaws from winter's abominable grip. I'm not too bothered either when the window closes shut each day at five o'clock. The gavel is sudden bang, echoing all the way to the back of the line, announcing quitting time, gone fishing, wake me in the morning at nine and not a minute before. I'll read maybe one or two more. My mother, when obviously when she was alive, she knew I wrote, but she didn't really know what, you know? And so one day I asked her to read some poems and, you know, and she read them and I said, well, you know, what'd you think? And she says, I had no idea you were so sad, son. I said, I said, mom, that was one of her last thoughts, unfortunately. So I figured, well, okay, I'll play a crude joke on her. I'll write something positive at a show. And this came out of the least likely place I was expected on her death bed. It was called Last Moments. They're in a hospital room, laid my mother, air escaping her lungs like a slow leak in a bicycle tire. In my head, it seemed so clear what to say to make the cancer go away. Words from her writer's son to make death sound more noble. But in those last moments when the sun softened and surrendered as footprints in virgin snow, the poetry dried up, replaced instead by a promise to write a lifetime wrong. With the commitment of a nun, I placed my mother on her death bed to never again bite my fingernails. Her eyes blinking with whatever strength they could muster. These words held in more disbelief than her dying. And last one, this is probably the most uplifting, inspiring poem I could write or I have written. And so I've dedicated this to my mom and it's called Letting Go. Close your eyes and extend your arms beyond where they have been before. Breathe, feel the new air invade your lungs. Tilt your head upwards and lift your feet off the ground. First one, then both. Let go of what was not possible. You can do this. Stand on the tips of your toes if you must. The universe will offer you the softness of its fur. It won't forsake you the way you have forsaken yourself. The winds and the burrows will recognize you as one of their own and join you on your journey. Do not be afraid, for you have dared to travel here before in the unbridled youthfulness of your dreams where everything may sense before the world knocks you down and skins your knees. Soar above the unbearable expectations of well-acquainted rituals. Find your life among the billions of stars. It has been waiting for you all this time, the one that no one else can claim but you. So thank you guys, I really appreciate being in such a very cool Long Beach vibe and I would get out beyond the campus a lot more and you guys have inspired me. And Mike, thank you, appreciate it. Hey, thank you, Michael. Give it up for Michael Whitlow. Give it up for Michael. I just wanted to thank everybody for joining us today. Thank Mike and all of our poets for your incredible talent, your passion, your ideas and just your really incredible, generous support of the creative and educational enrichment of our Long Beach Public Library community. And I also wanted to thank our library administration, friends of the library staff and all of you are guests who joined us for the Spoken Words, Spoken Arts Series program because we do it for you. Again, our sincere thanks and appreciation to everyone. Have a wonderful evening, stay safe and healthy. And we do look forward to seeing you again for more upcoming programs at the Miller Room and the Long Beach Public Library. So thanks again, everyone and have a great night.