 So I'm both a poet and a performance artist, so tonight I thought it would be interesting and rad to combine the two, which is super rare for me anyways. The slideshow that's occurring is a sample of the work that my troop, La Potra Nostra, and I have been doing in the recent years. And if you look closely, you can see that the epic Denise Benavides meet a cameo appearance with us when we were touring in Greece last year. So keep your eye out for that weird Denise photo. The following selection of work is a combination of my new work and some of my older work remixed and restyled for you guys just for tonight. And I'm losing my voice, which is making me sound like Corella DeVille, but that's cool. It's cool. This is a trigger warning. I repeat, this is a trigger warning. With all due respect, the following performance may trigger anyone who's currently suffering or has ever suffered from any of the following conditions. Corporate fatigue, white guilt or its counterpart, white savior syndrome, homophobia, mexophobia, sleep apnea, alopecia, alien abduction, gluten intolerance, alcoholism, germophobia, agoraphobia, arachnophobia, internalized racism, obsessive compulsive disorder. This performance may also conjure demons for those who suffer from acute class entitlement, fat phobia, transphobia, fear of aging and death, fear of second-hand smoke or anyone who smokes cigarettes, hypochondria, hatred of those who don't know how to recycle properly, seasonal allergies, sexist tendencies, an addiction to the Real Housewives TV franchise and a compulsive desire to go native during the summer months. It will also certainly offend anyone who is a culture vulture, still uses the terms orientals or illegal aliens, is in support of making America great again, suffering from fictional victimization, addicted to social media, prone to mansplaining and its physical counterpart, man-spreading, in denial of glass ceilings, an unapologetic gentrifier, culturally appropriative or anyone that's trying to recreate the great American nuclear family of the 50s. Please, if you've been triggered by this list, don't sue the library or radar. I love that Virgie's like entertained by that. My name is counterfeit. Lay over my skin, erase my blood, ink into my lover. I have inherited a burlisk trans witch, a blackened chronicle. My mental womb, a honeyed liqueur, a synthetic animal ripped from the bosom, a rouge fugue, dark mother tongue, unkiss your asthmatic breath, that grunting, tangled hypnosis. You took me down like a vial, a quick fix to stop me from eating my own hands, a meal for a blind dog. Girl in a knot. Madam, I have a sickness, the victim of God, a sad crucifix. Warm, moist, like a nurse, splay me open like a hot wet wedge, cure me of the rotting, a medication for angels. You can't guard the dead in their sleep, speak of lies, a death child clasping your breath, your subterranean shock treatment for koi dogs, spurs the perpetual intercourse of angels, a gluttonous tongue, white tingling pain, what's left when you remove all the needles? What has it come to, my kneading you? I work a box stuffed into a woman, a thin cadaver we stuffed my past into. You are necessary, fall down into my dangerous altar, my white hot horbelly. Blue eyes torn off, swallowed, a slip of the tongue, salt on the razor cut quick, opium liver swoon, bile pours out of me. Keep eating the time, a stolen sickness, part of this sleeping raggedy mother within me. Only your human veins I need to be under them. Lie down under me, a safeness is broken, a severed mask cracked. Unravel my spinal column, a hot, gauzy pulp, the scent of a cesarean wolf corpse. Close the incision carefully. Denise. Hand that touched me with dollar bills, I have borrowed something, fingers, cloth, crotch, a revolution. Bloody thighs, I rent you by the hour, inspect my push open the door, my blonde head, your daughter. Daddy cut her in circles. Hurl yourself into my gaping mouth and extract the suffering of my mother. I've learned to digest dull wounds, paper pennies, an esophagus stuffed with bees. Learn to overlook the details, pry open the gates, burn me in your quartz fire, that humble carcass caked in disposable abortion mud. Let me clean you up for once. Undress each doll individually, smash in their faces like empty wine glasses. Roll me over in your nylon hell. Cleanse me in your holy livered basin, a wet stomach stuck to an electric fence. The filthy aching of primeval birth, a hot mess of dirt and feathers, excavate and number all the irreversible mine shafts ensue a lethal heavy sleep. Sometimes it appears that we are growing more casual. Aluminous pink pallor, halting synapses replaced with salt, six dozen long stemmed roses forced into a pale vase. Just between us let's keep this situation slippery and active gagging. My blind body stitched up again an antiseptic madness. Hip and sternum pushed the limits of shadows, a bruised tongue that never heals. I am the queen of this sterile madhouse. Give me that asexual voice, that evil assembly line fingering, a bore horde to kiss until the milk runs out. Open up all the boxes before noon, let me eat you invisible. I thought I'd euthanized you, hacked you up and packed you into black-fack boxes, limb by limb, slick sinews sticking beneath my pointy plastic nails. That sweet sick smell sticks to the roof of my mouth, still today each morning. A wet death scent, a faint reminder that I must have a calling. On the other side of the mirror, it's always about the other side. Just ask me not to speak once more. It's as if the words I have, I swallow and spill out the next morning anyways. It won't happen today. It won't happen today. It won't happen today. They say it's normal to fall out in clumps, unmarked, unaccounted for. Each bleak bruise, unfully manifested, just enough to notice beneath sheer black stockings. Fishnets won't do unless they're stretched across my face, cutting into my lips in crooked, unhinged jaw. I saw it once in an oral x-ray, a half inch larger than its twin, a genetic disposition. That face, that face I saw it once, slapped across the mask of the one I love like a sick joke. Those black waxy ridges, horns twisted in powder like coal, you sick, sick fuck. Yellowing eyes pouring into me, sometimes it comes out rhythmically in pools of bile. Black strands streak the belly's middles, you've gotten inside me. An inky, thin, whimsy trace of you. Once I thought it was eyeliner, mascara, something sensible. Oops, I fell into the glass again, swollen wrists. When I was five, I rubbed my knees and stinging nettles on purpose. I was never a mute child. The forced silence was deafening, a precipice I rarely threw myself into, but was merely tossed into by others, a discarded dolly. They say it's normal, but what about those sharp pangs I once felt, now no more? I've played Russian roulette enough to know I'm just a blind, blind fool, a jilted draft of a woman. Thank you.