 I just wanted to do, are there any parents out there in the room? Yay, so I just want to shout out to the parents. Last time I did this poem I brought him up with me. Actually can I, can he come up real quick? Yeah, hi. I feel like he might calm because he was really awesome when I read this poem last time. How are you guys going to be focused on him instead of me, right? So, this is his second poetry reading. Let's see how this goes. Okay, Fragments on Motherhood in Nine Parts. She pushes her kiss into his fleshy cheek. This person who was a part of her and now breathes outside, each day becoming a new person. How therefore she is expanding through his expansion. How his face is broadening and she can see a big boy coming out of the little baby. Who is not long ago a strange alien thing she held in her hands, afraid he would forget to breathe. How she watched him take those jagged sporadic little breaths and imagine those tiny lungs jumping and billowing in fits and starts. And today is six months from the time he was cut out of her abdomen and he was startled to see the fluorescent lights. His hand reaching up as it was in her dreams. When she swam and he came upward and she wondered why this and not the pushing down. So she tried to summon down, down, down. But she could only see him dive up as she would come up for air. And this is how it was, him being lifted up out of the waters, not down through the canal, her passage remaining intact. Though his red bruised eye was evidence he had and she had pushed for 72 hours until it was blood and two fast contractions. All this she did for him and here he was smiling, usually he's smiling and forgetting it all or never knowing any of it. Two, he awakens with a new type of sound each day. Shakes a maraca, studies how a muscle works. Tries a syllable each day becoming someone. Three, I'm writing an essay about being a new mother and losing sleep and not having someone else to lullaby and hold and teach the baby and being in the middle of an anti-immigration Trump era that is literally separating my family. How all of that is enough to lose sleep but how do I organize that? Four, maybe I should just call it Trump is separating my family and get headlines. I could use the wow of it because Cuba is always wow in some way or another. A fascination or a terror to the USA all its golden era and now it's pariah status. Maybe it's I can't get any sleep and all the reasons in bullet point about why I can't get sleep. Six, economics are complicated. Gender is complicated. Culture is complicated. Sleep training methods are complicated. Why a baby wakes every 20 minutes or 1.5 hours or two hours can be complicated but at least that is science. Seven, single motherhood means the time to do each thing is slipped in the narrow cracks between nap and awake, feed and hunger, wipe and burp, playing activity 1, 2, 3 and 100 and lots of kisses. Eight, I am dreaming of a day when I can dream for more than five minutes at a time. Nine, I am in need of a shower. Can I give him back? He can make it through the rest. So just a few words and I'm going to keep moving because of the time. But I love the theme, I love the idea of the future of storytelling because we're all storytellers in different ways and similar ways and I love the words that Anastasia gave so I picked a couple poems that use history and also something that uses mythology. So actually the next piece I'm going to do is a flash fiction. That is, I won't tell you all the way what this is, Mananangal. It's a mythological thing, I'll tell you at the end. And it's called Mananangal Takes Revenge. In one of Issa's lives, she had been in love with a singer whose voice could draw tears out of bone. When he sang, women would trust their lovers once again. Men would forget about masculinity and yearn for their mothers. The tide stopped and the sky was filled with doves that plumed upward in a thrush of white from his quivering throat. The first time she heard his voice, she knew he was her true love. And then he had slept with her best friend when she was away to visit her ailing grandmother. When he tried to apologize, his brown eyes filled with rivers. But she packed her bags and flew away, white wings flapping. The doves followed her too and he could never sing again. In this life, she loved a painter, an androgynous woman who took her as a subject. The painter was obsessed with the mole on Issa's left cheek and would fill dozens of canvases a day with it. At the end of each day, paint cans tumbling, colors everywhere. The painter would burn all of her creations. Then she would wrap her slender ebony arms around Issa, crest her face, kiss the mole which was like a splotch of ink on Issa's high cheekbone and enter her until Issa became the agate green dripping from the painter's brush. In this life, Issa received the women who loved her too much and devoured the men who thought they consumed her. On this particular day, she rested inside the spoon shape of the painter's lithe body, the feathered comforter wrapping them like clouds. Stars twinkled from the depths of her lover's belly and tickled Issa's back. The lovers stretched their wings and flew to the moon just for the view and returned in time to eat the steamy pizza that had just arrived in a red cardboard box. Issa's phone trembled with calls from the man she had just killed, her tongue having punctured his heart painlessly like a needle. He did not know what had happened, had slept through the whole thing. When he awoke, his body felt numb but his life fell away suddenly like a crimson cloak. Thinking he was still alive, his ghost called her cell phone over and over again, leaving messages apologizing for his indiscretions. Issa forgave him as she licked her lover's nape, leaving rainbows as tattoos. So the Mananangal is a mythological character, it's kind of a strange surreal thing. I wanted to kind of take over this story of a female character that has this long tubular appendage that supposedly sucks babies out of bellies. And it was such an interesting thing and I think there's a lot of theories about this witchy kind of vampire-ish character. But I kind of wanted to make her into this different kind of seductive, androgynous kind of different interpretation. And so that was that. Okay, so taking mythology, or not mythology, but taking archives and history, my recent work has been about Cuba and the Philippines and looking at linkages in the past in terms of Spanish colonialism and then the US Presence around 1898. And just looking at how people of these islands were looked at as inferior and looked at as savages. So I took these two quotes, one of them you'll recognize, and then I'll do my poem. It's called We the Beasts. The first quote is from Antonio de Morgue. It's from Dutch traders in the Philippines in the late 16th century. Spain was all over the place at this time. Their laws and civilization were so poorly observed that they seemed deadened when the Spaniards landed there. In fact, the inhabitants there lived like beasts. And then this quote is from Rudyard Kipling's famous poem, The White Man's Burden, which was actually about the Philippines, but a lot of people didn't realize that in 1899. Take up the white man's burden. Send forth the best ye breed. To wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild, your new-caught-selling peoples, half devil and half child. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, we live without laws. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, we live without rules. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, we live without shoes. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, we live without you. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, we live without capitalism. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, we live with the land. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, eat coconuts and mango. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, eat pescalo and pollo. We the beasts of these far-flung islands have natural tans. We the beasts of these far-flung islands have wild curly hair. We the beasts of these far-flung islands, we swim like fish. We the beasts of these far-flung islands can move our hips. We the beasts have many gods. We the beasts do not need a church. We the beasts honor our ancestors. We the beasts are at peace with the dead. We the beasts can roast a pig. We the beasts can fight with spears. We the beasts can navigate seas. We the beasts can make honey from bees. We the beasts know how to love. We the beasts are not afraid to touch. We the beasts know how to play drums. We the beasts know how to make rum. Do you think you are better than we beasts as you land upon our far-flung islands, admiring our bodies, our perfect mouths that you capture like stars, attempting to control our light? Are your civilized any less beastly than we? You the beasts of those far-flung mainland have destroyed the earth. You the beasts of those far-flung mainland have disturbed the dead. You the beasts of those far-flung mainland do not know how to swim. You the beasts of those far-flung mainland do not know how to dance. You the beasts of those far-flung mainland turn red in the sun. You the beasts of those far-flung mainland envy our golden arms. You, the beast of those far-flung mainland, Stand stiff in the wind. You, the beast of those far-flung mainland, Try to copy our rhythms. You, the beast try to steal our songs. You, the beast try to steal our names. You, the beast try to school our children. You, the beast build churches upon graves. You, the beast of those far-flung mainland, Have turned paradise into trash. You, the beast of those far-flung mainland, Depend upon us. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to close with a really short one that is the first time I've ever done this trilingual thing. So apologies to Spanish speakers and Tagalog speakers because I'm about to ruin everything. But I feel like this is a, I need to do it. It's part of my new attempt to high-polylingual something, whatever they say. Polyvocality. Use some academic terms. We come swimming, it's called we come swimming. And it's again another quote, from the port of this island about 70 canoes came out, each containing three men, while some came swimming and others on logs. They had fine teeth, eyes, mouth, hands and feet and beautiful flowing hair, while many of them were very fair. Indeed, for a barbless people naked and so, of so little reason, one could not restrain himself from thanking God for having created them. So this is like weird thing that the colonial eye gays have about the barbless people. We come in boats, or we come swimming. We come in boats, or we come swimming. We come in boats, or we come swimming. Banka, take me home. We were born with fins, we come swimming. We were born with gills, we come swimming. We come swimming, we come swimming. Banka, take me home. We were born with fins, we come swimming. We were born with gills, we come swimming. We come swimming, we come swimming. Banka, take me home. We came in boats, we come swimming. We came in boats, we came swimming. We came in boats, we came swimming. We came in boats, we came swimming. We came in boats, we came swimming. We came in boats, we came swimming. Banka, take me home. We came in boats, we came swimming. We live, we live in the boats, we live, we live in the bodies, we live, banka, balicantayo, balicantayo al mar profundo, regresemos al mar, sailalim nandagat, banka, take me home. Thank you.