 This one's title, Why Undock Families Keep So Many Papers. Why Undock Families Keep So Many Papers. In case they ask for them for comedic irony. For when the day finally comes. In case you end up detained and they want to know what you are doing on July 7, 2002. Because what if to show continuous presence from now back to 1992 because the law they make someday might say only 1993 and before. You never know can be too sure and instead of one plan we always need to for when you do a regular plus two overtime hours of no one knowing your name or looking you in the eye. Then you can come home to read a note from an old classmate and confirm you're not a ghost. If you're out of beer, you can drink a Valentine's card from a child and wife you haven't seen in three years or 13 and help you fall asleep. For when the news channel brings a cold front that freezes over your hope, then you can wrap up in a blanket of your children's awards and feel warmth. When we hear the ticket stubs and the fading boarding pass reminds us of the first time we flew, and we thought it might be the last. And in case our grandkids asked, were you ever young. We want to prove we were someone who did things and didn't just language in a fake waiting room. I am inside a house that is heaving. Each ragged breath and unison with the wind outside. Right in soggy, the house gave me warmth. But I was the ungrateful daughter who left as soon as the door was open. For years it held us, even as its foundation shook from the weight of all the photographs and family fights. Every year a storm, a breath suspended, a wind outside a whip persistent against its skin. I am inside a house that was built atop a land where memories must be stronger than the wall surrounding them. Where the people are made of salt and water, a people who were purged, who came back, who never left. I am the reluctant resident of a house that never invited me. I came in through the back door and I claimed a corner for myself, just a little one. You made it clear that we were neither desired nor loved. You tolerated us as guests, as plague, as novelty, as everything but one of you. And yet each time your ceilings broke and your lights went out, there we were with hammer and nails, cutting the cane and catching the fish. In the good times we were there as well. Our tongues savoring the vows differently, vows cooked in the same salt and water. The gulf is ours too, you know. From the right vantage point, Grand Isle becomes Veracruz. Much older than those names is that rope between them and the people, a people made of salt and water. My mother says that before coming here she closed her eyes, placed her finger on the map, and that's how she found you. The rest of the world forgot you, but of all the places on that map her finger landed on you. Like salt sinking into water, we sunk into you, and you became home. We too are a people purged by borders and hurricanes, disasters human and God made. We too understand that by necessity, memories must be stronger than the walls surrounding them. That sometimes home must be packed into a suitcase and taken with you. That sometimes the home you return to is a broken container, a shoe waterlogged, a photograph leached by the sun. We know that anguish and that stubborn prayer. As delicate and crisp as the first fall wind, mingling with salt, lest by water, defiance on your lips, a whisper. It can be rebuilt. Okay, this poem is called Revisions. I say scholar activists aren't real activists, but I spend hours walking through bookstore aisles, leafing through pages, crouched down face to face with bottom level bookshelf scanning from side to side, smiling at the promise of answers. Sucking in air in surprise that someone thought of this and someone else wrote of that. Like a star of David, I follow the text lines and I mull them over as I step outside five days or 20 conversations later or on a sleepless night. I say scholar activists aren't real activists, but I quote them on my speeches at city halls and rallies, pour their crunched cold numbers into my cocktail of facts to increase my chances of being heard this time. I say scholar activists aren't real activists, but unknowingly sometimes I collage their ideas and phrases without footnotes or quotation marks because their hard earned truth feels airborne now has become natural with time. I say scholar activists aren't real activists, as if activists weren't real scholars, as if scholarship were only evidence in degrees and dollars as if the baddest advocates weren't people scholars weren't cross examined on every corner, as if defending their thesis weren't a daily affair as if they didn't to push with elbows to make space in a field that scorned them as if crafting magic out of nothing and making movement out of chains could ever take place without deep research theorizing and intellect. I say scholar activists aren't real activists, as if only scholars had PhDs as if only PhDs were scholars, as if I didn't know a handful or two of doctors without intelligence healers yet unpublished high school dropout theorist academics who can't think activists who cannot feel. I say scholar activists aren't real activists, as if we didn't break our hearts and minds trying to retell and rethink, reframe and dispel the myths, communicate persuade rewrite narrative set the record straight, align the text with with what we feel is true to what our grandmas knew to heart lessons learned in our homes and in neighborhoods. I say scholar activists aren't real activists, as if we didn't burn the midnight oil figuring out how to survive six years of solitary library cubicle wall confinement, how to organize 10 million silence voices into the megaphone of one page. How to legitimize our claim to have a say our right to get a turn at the helm and sway the discourse boat a little left. I say scholar activists aren't real activists as if we didn't fight to keep our fire alive amidst pearl suits and ties in boys clubs and clan friendly lands and thought to forts brick brick buildings were not too long ago our very presence once against the law. As if we didn't walk around clutching our ancestors clutching our accents and stories tight reciting self preservation mantras, while we thumb our precious beads of joy. And we remember then that there's a million ways of killing, and they know them all. So we renew our vows of wild flowering in our given metal cog swearing will also make it out alive. I say scholar activists aren't real activists under my breath afraid my other half will hear herself and walk away, leave me stranded on one side of yet another border. I say scholar activists aren't real activists because I still don't know how to love myself still on learning spiritual suicidal tendencies, still learning how to believe I'm good enough, still unraveling the mind stuck on monotone cookie cutter and still wrapping my head around a good fight army that rejoices in the rainbow gifts we share treasures are every face cherishes the soul and face beneath the justice hat it bears today. Thanks y'all. This one is called a radical proposition to myself and to you to it originally was an illustrated poem with like a series of 10 panels. Some folks may have seen it. So this is the first time that I'm actually reading it out loud. Not counting all the times I practiced it before. I am not afraid to love you. I am not afraid to love you the way you deserve to be loved. That is, I am not afraid to climb to the tallest point in the city and yell to the world that I love you, not everyone else should love you too. I am not afraid to guard you at night while you sleep to hiss and rip at the nightmares and chains that try to enter the room. I will guard you. And then when I am tired, you will guard me to a radical proposition. Suppose I love you now. Suppose I reject the rhetoric of bargains and borders of green cards and white lies, the maybes, the some days, the saviors who never show up but always charge admission. Suppose I silence the ghost that says your worth is measured by your suffering and instead I love you because you laugh like I do. That is deeply, that is stubbornly, and that is because you fucking feel like it. I am not afraid to love you because I know how hard it is to wake up in the morning, the body bracing itself for the mundane insanity of another day. The bones heavy with the weight of the mistake, the grief, the guilt, the burden of breath competing with that sinister caress in your ear whispering, you shouldn't be here. And yet here you are. Do you understand now how radical it is to be alive, to love and to be loved by you. Do you say that the revolution can't be won with bullets? Well, it won't be won with butterflies either. Suppose I told you then that your voice is both the bullet and the butterfly. Would you believe me? And what would you do?