 Okay, welcome everyone. I can see that we have participants are joining in and welcome to our event on the hidden history series organized by the source decolonizing working group. My name is Angelica Vaskira. I'm one of the convener of the series together with my colleagues and Ludi Price, Fazana Croatian and Amapoku. They will be joining us shortly. We are very thankful in particular for today's event to Ludi Price, who has brought this event to us. And we are very grateful and very delighted to welcome the undocupied organization. Welcome to all the fellow and I will just give a brief introduction about the organization before passing on to the fellow to tell us a little bit more. And the undocupied is an organization whose mission is to promote the work of poets undocumented in the US and raise consciousness about the structure of barriers that they face in the literary community. And the undocupied successfully worked with 10 renowned first book poetry contest to update their submissions guidelines, all of which require some form of immigration status in order to reflect a more inclusive publishing. In 2017, the undocupied offer competitive annual grants of $500 to poets with no string attached, which I really like that. So a very interesting organization, an organization that speaks to issues of migration that are very close to the source, a vision and mission. And so we are very, very interesting to hear from you tonight and to reflect upon those very difficult issues that are very close to us. And so we are very happy to hear from first and experiences of poets and the stories. Tonight, we are very pleased to have here with us. The participant for the organization Jenny Joseph was going to be chairing the panel tonight. She is the author and Libertas from the Philippine and she's the author of driving without the license winner of the condiment poetry price and decade of the brain, both from Alice James books. So if you're introducing and then in more details than I will not right now, the other fellow who are to be casting from Ibadá in Nigeria, and Leo from Tian in China, a little mellow from Brazil, and Oswaldo Vargas, and from the base in California. Yeah, so I am really, really excited to hear your story of poems, your readings, and we are very, very grateful again that you made the time so early to be here. Also, thank you to the audience again from a good morning, good afternoon, good evening. We know we have audiences joining us from all over the world. And so, I am very, very grateful and we thank you on behalf of so was and on behalf of the hidden history series. And I will now pass it on to Janine Joseph was going to introduce the fellow, and then the fellow will will do the reading and then, at the end, we will have some time for q amp a from the audience so we will like the audience to during the event to put the question in the q amp a box that you can see at the bottom of your screen. Put your question there, and then we will aim to answer and at least some of them at the end of the discussion and the reading. Okay, thank you so much. I'm, I'm now passing on to Janine to to to welcome the fellow. Thank you. Thank you so much for that introduction and I know we're convening from a number of time zones so good morning, good afternoon and good evening. It's actually really wonderful to to be here as part of this and ducky poets event to be here all at the same time but somehow not at the same time and to be here in close proximity to one another I feel like somehow this this particular event and this particular moment in time speak so so truly and so close to a lot of our experiences in that there there's just slightly overlapping but not quite close to one another, but yet somehow all hitting at the same at the same kind of like just really just wonderful to be here and and really to to bring all of the all these four fellows together. I know we're all probably just getting to know each other for the first time by zoom today so this is especially exciting. So I have a few more words about undocked poets and then introduced the fellows in the order in which they'll be reading today. So as mentioned, my name is Janine Joseph, and I am one of three co organizers for undocked poets, which, again, as mentioned is a nonprofit organization that supports and promotes the work of poets who are currently or who were formerly in the US. My fellow co organizers are the co founder Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Esther Lynn who is also one of inaugural undocked poet fellows. And it's a really exciting time for undocked poets in the coming weeks and months will be announcing and launching a new website for undocked poets, and also announcing a few more initiatives and programs that yeah that we're just really looking forward to to sharing with you all. Undocked poets really works to serve our literary community by supporting the art, the art of poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented advocating for underrepresented immigrants who feel that they lack a voice to challenge institutions policies, as noted by the work of our co founders, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Christopher Soto and Javier Zamora, and in putting together this open letter that compelled these presses and these publishers to change their eligibility which were discriminatory towards people born in different countries and who are coming to the United States with different and varying immigration statuses. Something that we do too is we try to expand the awareness for allies who want who wouldn't otherwise know of such barriers that are faced in this in our literary community. Today's reading and conversation will highlight the work of four of our undocked poet fellows today we have 13 undocked poet fellows. And I hope that their work will showcase the range and depth of their experiences identities geographies and aesthetics and approaches as noted in the description and the publicity material for this event. I've been I believe this, this little, this little phrase comes from something that Alina I believe you wrote poetry doesn't feed mouths doesn't build homes doesn't cure systemic ills. But what we have here is, you know, a sampling of work written by poets who are currently or formerly undocumented in America, who, you know, choose metaphor and line as a way of making their way through a country that doesn't recognize them or doesn't acknowledge them. And I'll say a little bit about each of our speakers and the order which they'll read so our first reader is any Lou who is the 2017. Undocked poet fellow, an inaugural fellow, any Lou was born and she in in the year of the goat. She's the author of border vista, which won the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize from perceive books, and her work is featured in poetry magazine, which shares ecotone two lines and elsewhere. She received an endocrine or inaugural and occupants fellowship, and was recently named a Jen Nick Ian scholar by the Detroit Journal. She's currently working on a hybrid memoir about parole, translating the poetry of the yeah, and editing fiction and nonfiction at Gray Wolf press. The second reader is Aline Mello. Aline Mello is a Brazilian poet and editor. Her work often centers around themes of identity, religion, and the body, and the experience of living of the self living in diaspora. Her immigrants and undocumented identity have influenced her writing and her art. And she is an undocumented fellow and an MFA candidate at the Ohio State University. Her debut poetry collection, more salt than diamond is out now. Our third reader will be a spot as Waldo Vargas as Waldo Vargas is a 2021 undocumented fellow as Waldo is a former farm worker, a graduate of the University of California Davis. And as I mentioned a 2021 undocumented fellow. As well as anthology features include the font law and anthology dedicated to queer poets of color. If you can hear this poems and protests of an American inauguration. Eman Eman, Poets writing the unsullied on Borderlands and Borough Chicanx writers of the 21st century. His work can also be seen in the Louisville review, Queen mobs tea house. We've talked to the centers review roster magazine, last poetry class, West trade review, double coat magazine, midway journal, so most and the scritto pine hills review for Salta, and the green mountains review tribute issue to former US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who lives and dreams in Sacramento, California. And the final reader of the evening Toby Cassim, also a 2021 undocumented poets fellow. Toby was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and has lived in the United States since 20, since 20, since 2003. His work has been supported by Stadler Center undergraduate fellowship and an undocumented fellowship. He won Yale University, Sean T Landon poetry prize, and his poems have been published in the Volta, the Brooklyn review, the Hampton Sydney Poetry Review, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere. I'm looking forward to hearing you all read your work into our conversation after the reading. Annie, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Janine. It's so wonderful to be here with my fellow fellows, but also with so us. It's incredible to be part of this hidden histories series. Yeah, and to just, and to be with all of you know all of you who are in the audience to thank you for coming. So I'm going to read poems from Border Vista. Here's the book. It's probably backwards for all of you. And before I start, I guess I want to say a little bit about the title, which comes from one poem in the collection. Which is actually a technical term for a national border where the wilderness is so dense that it has to be cut down or deforested in order for it to be policed and maintained. This particular border vista that I lived very close to in 2013 to 15 was the US Canada one in Vermont, and that one is six meters across in the woods, which is 20 feet. And it's colloquially, colloquially known as the slash and can be seen from space, much like the Great Wall of China. And so I think about that space, which a friend recently told me is a kind of negative of the DMZ, which has become kind of a wilderness, a protected wilderness area, you know, sort of by accident. And I think of that space between Canada and the US and all those trees that were cut down, and that kind of empty space that kind of scar across the forest. And some of these poems, you know, trees are very important throughout the book, and I think about the trees of that space being kind of resurrected to keep company with the trees of my poems. And that's kind of how the book traces my life, my family's life and lives of others like us who have this kind of the slash cut through, right, and, and I'm really interested in. I think that as well those bio mentioned dreaming. I'm really interested in dreaming as another kind of border vista, but one which is so fruitful, one where you can see and be in both places or, you know, where the kind of porousness of experience is one that's cherished rather than policed. That's what I will say. And now for some poems. The first one is called the story. I was born in Xi'an, a 3000 year old city encircled by walls. Before I arrived, my mother visited me in dreams. A girl, my father's hair, my mother's mouth. She waited devouring shrimp and green apples. Seven years later, she left. My father bought a red motorcycle, a gleamed gold specs and red enamel. My grandfather moved into the campus apartment where my mother's books were still stacked. And my father stayed on the other side of town. Son fell through knotted curtains. The moon visited us in turn. In summer, the road out of campus kicked dirt in our faces. Sweat mixed with dirt made a new and tougher skin. In winter, motorcycle rides with white cotton face masks and stiff wool coats. The air's silt like snow. My mother's voice on the telephone. Where do you miss me? But I could not locate missing in my body. Why document this? As if forgetting were the worst thing. The ocean came to my city once, city once mine, city so dry and ill equipped that any hard rain will make it flood. It was no ocean. Just the sky. When your city floods with streets like asphalt riverbeds, carry your child to piano lesson on your back. Wear shower slippers, the only waterproof shoes you own. Be prepared for nails, a long nail, the arch of the foot. Another time, me fevered for days. My mother gone. She asked me to work. He spread couch cushions on the office floor for me to lie on, asked me what I needed. Tell me a story, I said. He never told stories, but that day he told me this. It has a happy ending. The bunnies find their way home to their mother. My eyes exhausted of tears fall to the ground, trees spring up where they land, trees with eyes in their bark. My mother never came back. Instead, I went to her to Ohio and lead skies. After the story was over, the rabbits sheltered under the eye trees. My father covered me with a thin blanket. He could fall asleep. He could go back to work. I think that poem was really interesting to me because I was really trying to think about what it means to tell our stories as undocumented or formerly undocumented poets and what parts of our stories we want to share, how we want to shape them. There's a particular story that my father told me is a real one that he did tell and I left him a blank spot on the page because I wanted to keep that for myself. And so there's sort of a gap there and I just am silent in that part of the poem. Memory in a foreign language. Weekday afternoons, I walk from school to the English class in the foreign language university. The air is the color of amber, or it is only this way in memory, which has stained it like a film remastered. The way I learn a language is the way someone you love looks when speaking it. And English is my mother, moving her face in ways she does not at home. Long pursed o's, wide smile that's almost a grimace. The lesson underway sounds with the letter L. I mimic the sounds my voice swallowed by the class. I stretch my mouth and feel the shape of what I don't yet understand. Chanting, lack, luck, lock, lack, luck, lock. And what happens next, I don't remember yet. It's also an inviting interest of mine. To write about childhood experiences that happened in a different language in English, which was the foreign language and which of course is a colonial language. And there's so much to say there about power and about our relationship to that. And changing gears a little, now we are in Vermont, close to that border vista that I talked about. And this one is called night swim at Shadow Lake. I can barely swim, but I don't tell them that. At the beach, the guys joke about leeches longer than my hand. They strip and hoot with pleasure as they loop as they leap off the slick rock. I keep my underwear on, feel my way in the rocks first becoming dirt than a soft sucking silt. Without my glasses, the lake surface gleams, oiled with stars. Someone once told me to imagine the water holding me up to the air buoyant. But all I do is sink. The lake's long fingers plug my ears, grip me like a hand closing. Panicked, I plash back to the shallow muck and wait. In the car, back to the farm, I sit with towel stuffed between my legs. No one tells any jokes. In the tense silence, I realize they'd meant for me to take off all my clothes. I pull down my window, let in the night and its shrill insect trills, its sharp slops of wind. My entire life, I have been afraid of the wrong things. Okay. Another Vermont poem. This one is called permit. And it's long and skinny like this on the page. I drive in a blizzard. I was 22 and could finally legally work my job at the China moon buffet, 30 minutes away from the two bedroom, where we lived a mile from the border. He was 20, he was 33 in the passenger seat of his $800 Forester saying almost nothing as I inched up the snow thick road. Over the asphalt ended and the woods began the packed snow beneath the tires made a noise, like pressing and bending the pages of a book, the sound of something crushed against itself. He was always teaching me something. Even after I got licensed. I never considered driving away. Okay. As you can see those Vermont poems are kind of suffused with the, with many different kinds of fear. And the ways this kind of compound each other because of our proximity to the border and that constant reminder of how unsafe it was. The final poem I'll read is a prosy one called entries from the hottest year on record. And it's kind of goes across the page like this and they're numbered. Thank you so much for listening. Entries from the hottest year on record. One woke up early to write killed flies instead. In the pot, I boil bones with hot y'all and funnel attempting to reproduce a past taste. The result is a great diluted broth ghost enough to conjure. Three, on Facebook, you can tag a picture as my grandmother. If you hover your mouse over the blue tag, you can see 5,017 pictures of my grandmother. And I have them mine. For this lap of plastic slippers against cement. How long have I imagined you in your absence. I remember it will rain today. Then look up to see it is already raining. The season slides. Excuse me the season slides to a close. A woman kneels over a tub of water in it, a dark muscle circling. Seven, the relationship. The question of the relationship between suffering sorrow and sorryness. What equation could be formed, if any. Eight, Microsoft wants to correct my uncertainties. When I write maybe it underlines it suggests I correct it by removing the maybe. If you shut one eye, depth disappears. Nine, I want to become legal again and permanent. I tried to draw a pine cone distract myself with a manageable difficulty. 10. What was it they asked you. Why did you. They couldn't connect the dots. Why didn't you. The story didn't line up. 11 having one sided conversations is a form of madness devotion to an entity that cares not for you as a delusion, which is another form of madness. This waiting is one more anger, a madness grief. 12. I once thought myself impervious to disaster immune to loss. Sure, bad things happened, but not to someone like me. 13. Doppler effect as one way of understanding positionality. The sirens whale changes depending on where you are in relation to its movement, and on whether or not you perceive yourself as a vestibule as unlawful as the one whom it seeks. 14. Loneliness, having no one to tell you stories about yourself. 15. After many years of not wanting to I decided to forgive my father, but the decision cannot be implemented for many years after 16 Virginia Wolf describing how she felt upon seeing a performance of check off the cherry orchard quote, like a piano played upon at last, not in the middle only, but all over the keyboard, and with the lid left open so that the sound goes on. 16. That skinless feeling, your own endlessly permeable self. Thank you. I can come next. That's correct. Okay. So, I'm going to start with, so here's my book. It's very pretty. And I actually have prologue. And usually it's not normal for a book a poetry to have a prologue. So I always make sure to read it, just to be like, you know, it's my, it's extra of me, and I'm going to go in and read from it. I always make a sandwich, some poems from the book with some new hopes. I always feel like, I don't know, like it feels weird to read from something that I wrote so long ago, you know, while I'm like writing this stuff so I'm going to try and spice it up with reading from from both prologue. So also before I start, I'm so thankful that I'm here. I love seeing my fellow undocumented poets and I've met Annie and Jeanine before in person. I've never met Osvaldo or Toby so it's so good to meet you on zoom. I hope that we get to meet in person. So here we go. When I was little, I imagined I could control the wind. I would stand in the gathering of trees beyond the parking lot of our apartment building arms by my side and listen to a growing wrestle feel for a movement of my arm here. When I sense the wind was coming. I'd raise my arms as if I'd called it for my hair would rise with the gust and I'd stay that way arms raised hair wild when lacing through my fingers until my senses would tell me it was almost over. I would lower my arms according to the speed of the wind. And the moment would be gone. I imagined it just enough that sometimes I believed it. I believe there was something just beyond reach and that if I discovered it, my whole life would change. This belief kept me going for a long time. A wooden stick could be a magic wand. A father could return after leaving a new immigration law could be signed any day now. So something I've been thinking about a lot of things. I'm in school right now and it's summer. So I'm not really taking active classes so my brain is free to wander. One of the things that I've been thinking about is the immigrants relationship with time. And how we consider how like in order to survive, we have to have this hope that something's right around the corner. You know, like something's going to change and something good is coming and we just need to hold on. And like sometimes that is really attached to religion and and like this faith of like, you know, this is all for a reason and this is all going to get better. And all of the reasons that this is happening are going to be clear to us in the future. And we just have to be faithful to whatever it is that we're trying to be faithful to. And I've been having kind of a complicated relationship to that because there's a part of me that sees it as wisdom, just from, you know, my elders like the way that they have survived is that they have always kind of thrown. Their minds a little bit forward right like a little bit to the future to imagine something that the coming and and I want to honor that. That survival instinct and I want to honor that that it's you know it's it's worked in a way. And at the same time I feel very angry at that. Because it to me like, you know, another part of me is just like, Oh, it's just a way to keep us subdued or, or to keep us from from saying from wanting too much, or from fighting too hard or from breaking away from whatever it is that we're trying to stay faithful to. And I don't know, I, I go back and forth when I'm thinking about that and I try to to put that in my writing. I could never really write anything that I want to write about like I can't sit down and be like I'm going to write about Dolly Parton, because then nothing will come out. And sometimes like, if I just like think a lot about Dolly Parton, and then like, later go write a poem, like she might come up you know like but it has to be sort of like I have to sneak up on it I can't like, just go for it so there is another poem. As I'm sure my fellow fellows know but I being an immigrant and being in a documented immigrant or being an immigrant with some sort of provisionary allowance. It takes a lot of documentation. And I am constantly losing all of my documents like I mean there's a part of me that's like oh no like what kind of immigrant am I that I'm like constantly losing my first passport, you know. But then there's another part of me that's like, who people don't know where their first passport is, I was seven. Like, what I was supposed to keep up with my first passport. Anyway, so I'm kind of, you know, also toward between the two of like judgment and like also like, okay, you show me your first passport. But this is one of those where when I have I have the food action for childhood arrivals, which is like a provisionary thing. And I have to submit to renew every two years, but also one of the things you have to do is every time you move, you have to tell us CIS that you're moving and where you're moving to. And it's an interesting thing because you, you know, I feel like when you tell someone you're moving via letter, it's like you're like email, like emailing a friend or you're writing a letter to an old friend or something so kind of played with that a little bit in this one. It's called USCIS change of address notice. I painted my headboard blue before the move cut my hair short. You'll see in the new picture. My dog is coming with me. I haven't seen the new apartment, but it's a studio by the school. I wish I could tell you I was studying the cure for cancer, the destruction of ice. I mean ice. How to keep the planet alive. I wish I could afford a new mattress. I am tired most days from doing very little. My back hurts from sitting from carrying from not going anywhere. I don't stretch like I used to. Remember me like I was in my first passport. My orange lipstick hair pulled back, not knowing the decision my parents were making. Not deciding on anything myself. The flight we took the kind of milk in the fridge. Here's something you don't know. I learned English slowly. I didn't think we'd stay. This next one is called at the end of the world. We go for a walk to speak of dangerous things like violence and revolution and a childhood spent collecting sticks and calling them birds. Isn't the sun trying to kill us. Wouldn't an all knowing God know this. And wouldn't an all knowing God get bored to death. All I want is a dishwasher. All I want is to live walking distance to everything. Every night, I remind God of all I've done for him. Just in case I die in my sleep. I was raised very religious. And it's kind of super religious well into my 20s 33 now. So writing about God in an honest way that allows me to question into actually be myself when learning about God and not just, you know, adoringly or whatever. It takes kind of like a certain amount of bravery, because my mom is still pretty religious. And, you know, it's, it's like, it's like how far do I go without upsetting her, or even like, how far do I go without assuring that I go to hell. Like, there's like a fine line there of like, I'm going to question it, but also like, like just in case. Let's not go too far. Um, so, yeah, this one is a new one. I've never read it out loud so we'll see but it's the title of it right now is Exodus 3320. It's this verse in the Bible that God tells Moses, but he says, thou can't not see my face for their show now man see me and live. I might change the title for this kind of obscure verse but we'll see I'm not I'm not great at times. In this one I will say that I didn't capitalize any references to God, which you know is like shocking so I'm pushing the boundaries. When you told Moses to avert his eyes. Was he not worthy. Were you embarrassed. Think about the baby teeth we tossed onto the roof of our house. There are not enough songs about how much you take, and you take, and you take without death, would we have lived forever. You know, hundreds of years would become brittle with so much loss. I like to think the tooth that didn't wash away with the rain that wasn't picked up by the wind, yellowed from the sunlight was discovered, recovered by a magpie who've been searching for something. In that size, the cornerstone to her nest that holds twigs and plumes and spotted baby blues. I want more wonderful and this one is back to the book. So I describe my book as like sad immigrant bones. That's what they are. But I have heard from people who have read it that it ends hope like with hope. And that's very like I'm a very glass half empty kind of person very pessimistic. I've tried to work on it but at this point I'm just like you know what the world needs pessimists like why would I, why would I not be myself. So I was surprised to hear that it ends with hope. And I think that maybe like in comparison to all the other poems my last poem is a little bit helpful. But yeah, let's finish this reading of mine with some hope. I belong to myself. I must become my own home to return to. When asked, where are you say, I am here. And when I feel the earth could let go at any point. Relax, it's hold on me. I reach across my chest, my hand squeezing my own shoulder and say, I know, I know. And when asked, what are you answer here. Thank you so much for for listening. And I'm so excited to hear the next two. Well, good morning. So my name is Osvaldo Rodriguez. I am a writer here in California, 29 years old, and I shout out to so as for inviting me here, Janine Esther Marcello founders of Indaki post program, which I have been applying to since its inception. And it was only until last year that I finally got it because the third, the third rejection. I'm like, okay, I think it's like, it's time, like, let's not let's not do it. But then I'm like, Marcello's like, just, you can do it one more time. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to do it. And I did. And I'm really happy at it. And so I'm very, very happy about that. And so I write largely about my farm worker experience when I've been me. My family live on a farm nearby in a town called Gulf California. And professionally, like, I was working there for like about four years after I graduated high school, because this was about 2010 and about that time that was about the only thing you can really do with someone in my situation. And so I did that for four years, funded myself through community college and then got today was to do undergrad in a history. But around the same time in 2016 is when I started writing what I consider to be like my, the beginning of this career of mine. And it all started with the boy. And so the first, let's see, so I have a manuscript going on and it's called to Salazar and back. And these are all from that collection that I'm hoping to have out there one day. And the first one is called a noble house of Salazar. Bring me a beer halfway through it. I unravel mistake mistake. Oh God mistake. The waitress asks if I'm okay. How do I say that I hope he knows my weight before the night is done. He can sell my bones when he's done with me and I'd still ask which one fetched more money. He drops me off, but I still pretend my steps lead up to his family home, the spot in the hallway reserved for the portrait of his bride. Mount me on the wall. Call me a success. Thank you. Second one is a title subjects of a new game. And this one is inspired by a Sumerian God a very, very old God of agriculture and I think consider one of the first ones titled a new key and and UGI. And so I just read it in that perspective. I've done this for so long. I began to name the corn stocks and lead processions for when they buckle. I dig lanes where the machines forget to, I am a student of water, my teacher nowhere to be found. I have a theory for who is behind this wind that chills my way back. And Nugi Sumerian God of water take over my arms when I just can't anymore, like you do with my parents. I only get to ask Nugi one question per lifetime. Mine is, do you know if the sun has nicknames for us, or if it reacts at all when we are called our people slurred. Third one I got for you today is a call that that goes Romero and got California. It's this cute little chocolate truck near the train tracks there. And it's only called up because I was in line once and there was this very beautiful man in line and this is the result. In line, I noticed his shirt stuck to his chest, just like mine. Tell me more about the field that soaked you and what you traded for all these tendrils growing out your back. Now with a better grip, thanks to my goosebumps still saluting you captain operation pull him under is going according to plan. The next one I got for you today is called to the ego who called me mice. Our tassels grow higher than any tax bracket we'd ever be in. I like this soil, even if it isn't healthy for us. On the days the lanes between us ran dry, you handed me water tucked away for this moment. Like conquistadores who thought the horizon the trucks assemble, nothing personal, we are just from a parched nation. The next one I have is called a migrant lover syndrome, and this one was inspired by a former love of mine, whose brother warned him that I was with him for a green card. This is inspired by that. My great lover syndrome. Don't you know he just wants to use you for green card. Jokes on you. I like your doorstep mouth stuffed with whole clothes. Look how I bite down. At least my teeth past the test. Even muffled your family name couples with mine, a him queued up by a bell ringer who will one day wake up early to go wake our tallest supporters. The next one I have for you today is called up to the monarch inspired by one of my favorite authors Tony Morrison and the prologue to her one of her novels home. She has she sets the scene with horses and the subject or rather the speaker is talking about how they're standing like men, and that just always stuck with me and so I just took one of those lines and ran with it inspired by her. So this is to the monarch. We stood like monarchs who forgot they were in diaspora. We just found a place to put our bags down. The locals wonder why we carry so much and crane their necks for the chance to look upon our spines bulging out as they also want to breathe in the air of the new sanctuary where our kind flutter about. This is our culture. Me and a stranger can I the same Zenia plant and take turns. Nectar looks better on him. He rolls in the excess that drips down in the name of the season. If he'd like he can visit the branches I'm more used to and leak with me there. Let's see. The next one I have is titled I'll skip that one. I will do one called kneeling in the city park and I just want to preface this by saying I didn't actually do this. It was just in a moment of heartbreak and this is what happened me just sitting in the park and thinking Oh what if I actually like was reacting this way. Because I'm afraid or sorry, kneeling in a city park because I'm afraid the sun will find out more than that's supposed to. So I tried to find some shade, the clouds come in and I need new shoes. The water for the feels like eons, and I'm sure what my skin will slide off of me any second. Oh God, please let the fall into lovely or hands. My dad used to bury stillborn calves and I swear this is my punishment. The accomplice holding the shovel found and tried the city forbids people from picking the fruit fallen from trees. I have a big ask to stay intact long enough to so I can scratch into an orange peel. I want to smell like an orchard that's only a bus stop away where I'm on a buck can be found proud of me. I have just two more left for you today. One is called Gemini Prince come home. Happy Gemini season. I'm turning 30 on on June 1 and it's actually really exciting because like. I mean, I've been undocumented for like, almost 28 years technically, which is weird when you really think about it like, how does how does someone just stay in this for so long. But there are plenty of people that can speak to that and even longer. So, but I only mentioned that because it was just something that was on my mind and the Gemini aspect of it just like these dualities and you know living in the in between and these sorts of things that we can definitely get into. But I have a bit of a time limit so Gemini Prince come home. No wonder German eyes are buried the deepest. I am the other half that lives on. I come back out of the earth to say it isn't fair. He was supposed to stay up with me when the satellites powered down back to the surface. Jump from one to one like we used to on the supermarket tile. My parents voices call out for us to come back to the front. We think we have all the time to chalk the borders of our kingdom here there and also here. I'm drafting his eulogy, a string of I love you's after every coffee mug gone cold on his porch, brewed before every cry for yet another boy nickname Renaissance. My last home for you today. It's called ancestral game, and it's named it's inspired by grandpa who I never got to actually meet, unfortunately. So I was born in Mexico, and I was brought to this country to the US before I was even a year old. So that whole thing is just a complete abstract to me. So it is even even the idea of like who my grandparents were, and thankfully I've got to meet the grandparents on my mother's side you got to visit on a visa. But on my dad's side I never got to visit them unfortunately, or see them. But I like to think of him like around. And that's what this pump is about ancestral game. Abuelo, who I picture with a voice like Clark Gables, ringing out whenever he took off his shoes in the lobby, always starting off each conversation with an apology for accusing my dad of stealing money from the shop to buy me milk years ago. He stood no higher than my shoulders, but I could always find his hands on them, insisting that as his grandson, I had the magic and vocabulary to thumb through his book full of people he had wronged. So you will keep writing in this me home but that's okay. You are worth the blood. Thank you so much. Good. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everybody across the time zone. Like everybody said it's so beautiful so fun so exciting to be here amongst the other on Dr codes fellow, with you to mean and with the SOS Center. Yeah, I feel so lucky and so so like full of joy to be part of this community. It makes me really happy to be able to get that acceptance letter. Yeah, I'm going to read homes from no collection or from the active collection or the active generation. And my name is Toby Cassin. I'm here at the local at the local library where I work in a study room is very quiet, which is great. And, yeah, I'll just read a few things that I prepared before the phone and get into it. So in attempting to cultivate a wide range important practice. I don't and can't always address questions about undocumented patient or being documented directly. Like, like Elena said, I'm also in doctor which is like a provisional status that keeps you from being directly criminal in the eye of the law, but also like intensifies the law's attention to you like it intensifies the law surveillance of you. So, you know, one way that I think one documentation and documentation is just like how cookie it is as a semi category is always you're always kind of in between two places. And that ultimately becomes I think the kind of strength for poets for thinkers for anybody really if you don't want to think of yourself as singular. I wouldn't be the right to be because that to not to be a single being as, as Fred moving Edward we saw today. Of course, I wouldn't be the writer and without displacement. I wouldn't be the right I am without the alienation of being of a place and being absented from the record of the story of that place, the place wants to tell. It gave me a chance to cultivate a voice that tries to exceed tries to survive and tries to defy the logic of documentation. So, I guess what I'm saying is poetry is a language in which I've chosen to believe in magic. And maybe extend that logic into my work. I think the most resistant trace of documentation in my work is the question of separation. My family, when we first innovated this country and it is half of us so as you grew up separate from my younger two siblings, or going down to and they grew up in Nigeria, and I grew up here with my brother and my parents. And as I've grown up and cultivated like meaningful relationships all my siblings. And it's kind of created this urge and this desire to think of separation beyond the physical to think about how presence persists and presence survives the kinds of restrictive work that documentation can perform the ways that colonial logic and that material logic can kind of make you feel like your body is being literally constrained literally held held apart from what you want to be with the way how you want to feel. So, I think that that question will kind of be threaded through the bones I've chosen. And also, like, like all the problems that we've heard today I hope that we'll hear the kind of a protest against freedom for this against silence that the status and documented assumes. I like I like this collaborative creation of a different record a different archive for the idea of documentation and the idea of immigration. I think, yeah, I'm again very grateful for everybody here. This first poem is called natal chart. It kind of appears in in vignettes, separated by asterisks. I think at some point those are meant to represent stars like being a Libra. This is a natal chart for now and that might change the chart. The last time I saw my sister, she looked like my sister, eight years younger, her sixth birthday resemblance runs so strong in our blood, they put an ocean between us to slow the difference. I sweat over the false logic of replacement. Cindy is a growing echo across the distance, everything does travels to reach us. Nigeria is a living sacrifice amplified in thickening time. Remember to call home displacement the way. Even again, everything in my mom's house is a metaphor for the cosmos place with holes in them ovens open for sun low home under pictures growing apart. We're all parallel tracks of each other overlap deviations DNA reaching quote when two universes are in phase they are coherent rooms are full of frequencies because we can't isolate. In her ears scratchy for a voice in American vacuum. If the band that expands to keep the universe contain had a name, it would be called the universe. Kasim, Kasim, from the Arabic, one who divides one who distributes. I intended to share widely to turn severance into a house, remove my father to fill the ellipse in his brothers affairs. The whole fill ate his house rupture gravities of departure. Me and my brothers had an airplane in the cabinet. We let our coordinates drift in the dark. I touch windows at night and join the dots and winding rings to keep finding you, your residue and orbit. To meet you, I curved the line keeping time apart. This poem is called family stone. It's about one of the times I wasn't I hadn't finished college yet and I was working in my dad's kind of shop. And at this point, I had become documented my dad was still undocumented and continues to be. So when it really like go to home people are rent tools. I would have to show my ID, which is fine. But they would ask him and I would be the one to like present the idea because I know what we're getting. I just, I was just there and support. That was a fun experience because like everybody at the ground shops books Spanish except for us. So it's always, it was like a moment of both connection and separation with like the immigrant community in DC and in northern Virginia around this. This is called a family stone. This is my daddy for ID I showed them my when we needed blades and generators to light the granite by these operations. I botched my name for those rentals. I'm working legitimacy. The big sauce sliced through stone water gush from the cuts and ran all the words I've ever written through this loses. Heavy like great slurry with twinkles every now and then, like a slate late catching the night sky. In the elastic evenings we cut templates of strangers kitchens until after mommy called about dinner. I learned to measure the lines and during straws of these long hours, crawling to set the scenes in place creases in the stone patients of our prayers. Pat legs starch bone white with dust we wear off the factory floor. That year with you is just a taste of earth's finest light in my lung. I hear a glimpse of quartz turn in your chest when you cough dust out of sleep. Your wings must be alabaster by now with all the bronchial flowers you bloom. Occasionally a mistake correct my phone. The credit company asked for you. You mean my dad. I reflect flex whatever debt they call to collect. I lie. All of it is surely mine. Also shout out to Alina. This is this could be about not having a birth certificate. It's called mother tongue but I'm going to subtitle it person to get for today. Mother tongue. My first love was stillness. My favorite memory is my mother remembering that even breathing for me was about was turbulent of birth. Instead of whales I filled my lungs with sips of air punctuated gifts. Tested voice carefully because mom laps between each and imitated baby bleep. Every bet is a punchline. My life was slated for another. In the womb I chilled so stone still they painted my room pink. Prepared for pre-year. Prophecies always find their truest expression. The ring that spun clockwise over mom's tummy must have hypnotized me or slowed time to this crawl I can't outpace. Always late, up late in my sister's time zone she recalls our mother's intimation. It listens like a daughter to me and I sleep redrawn as what I can be in tentative acts. A daughter, son. The quiet that says I love, I'm lonely too. 50-50 the supposed probabilities splitting speech and silence. Son and daughter, life and being dead. Still it won't cover the gradients of possible illusions our first breaths see between. This is called crude at the international school. It's about the Nigerian school. It starts about Nigerian school that my siblings and I went to and then it just kind of goes off the rails. Crude at the international schools. In Nigeria, a white lady headmaster asked me to speak to my parents about my brother sounding like a Nigerian. Toxic properties and speech called my blood separate from itself. Like oil unprepared for the global marketplace. So this is accent study for a reckoning with what's left. Me and my brother are still the same voice. I put my hand in his teeth to feel the edge he leaves unrefined and wear it in red where I write. Some people come and call specialties on camera. I'd be wearing dip and black gold at birth. Head to toe. Dripping smoke from our home starter binary. Local authorities spill our work back into the water we drink. All our survival their property and anchor it further out at sea. My brother and I grew up on opposite faces of an oil spill eating ink until our visions converged swallowed so much in the same slick throat. Words bloated with the distance that rushes in my open mouth search for you. I know we meet when it's blood in the water. Not money. Not the greatest shimmer of ropes. And sometimes being undocumented also means falling in love with someone who lives in a different country and not being able to leave forever. Just be, you know, in a long business relationship because of USCIS or DHS or doctor. This is called astral trailer. Because there's a shadow and everything that gets too excited to ask you its dimension. When you tell me your dreams. What kind of engines that hits to. But so I might never build it one day. I feel your dreams widen making room for my consciousness. It's maybe I didn't have to ask. I felt the dream show to propel itself toward discoveries of further reasons to celebrate those enclosures where we cannot touch and muffled their questions. I asked what the actual plane is for an early sense of what it could be like on the other side of these windows. The first light comes in slightly obscured by weeks. I wake up twice every day against the difference between our sunrises. The darkness lives when I feel you get up and actual light fills the distance. What happens between my awareness that you're awake and my waking. I won't call it sleep since you show me how to keep my eyes closed to see. The last one I'm going to read is actually I never do this but I went back to my undergrad workshops final bag it. This is my first workshop in 2016 2015 with Sally Keith. And one of the notes in Sally's response grade was, you know, you have a lot of questions about distance and separation in this in this packet. And I was like, I mean, like when I was first writing I didn't, I didn't think of it as anything to do with immigration but I think one of the fun things about poetry is the way it like deepens your questions without you knowing it. And so all of a sudden you're writing about what you've been living. More honestly, but I, yeah, I think it's fun. This poem is interesting. I don't know that it's a great poem but it's also a big mess. And it was untitled, and it's about distances. titled Every morning I swing my car into a space between two cars. Most mornings I cannot see that space, but I envision it behind me as I fill it. And the space is inside of me and I'm inside of it. An idea of its emptiness persists. We hold each other in the dark. The lung expands against my chest. The space between our breathing is drum skin thin. I wonder if you stopped breathing with the disruption helped me forget how. I forgot to separate my purple toothbrush with another frozen pizza with that little black bar. I had to snatch the toothbrush off the conveyor belt and apologize because our cashier was convinced that I shared a life and a home with a stranger. And I could have loved her in her startled face. I hope you don't sense an attack on your identity. But I can't, I can't imagine that you are so different from her, or more different from her than you are for me. I don't know if this spans between us. Sometimes I feel a bridge to living outside of me, and this can be enough. Thank you. Thank you all so much for those readings. I feel just maybe this is a little unfair to say but I feel like with, with every other reading with every other encounter in poetry. I feel like there's always some part of me that is in the reserves, or maybe perpetually in hiding. I'm not entirely sure. But I feel like that part of me is always activated in a different way when I'm with my people. When I hear you all read your work, when I, when I read your, when I encounter your work out in, in, in like journals or, you know, just watching you read the different events. Yeah, I just feel like I'm activated in a very, very different way. I feel like that part of me is much more alive, that, that usually isn't, I don't know, maybe that feels unfair to say about all these other poets who I love and admire and just other works that I read but certainly something, something different feels like happens when, when I'm with you all. The things that excites me most about being in a room with you all, even if it's a virtual space, is how I'm constantly reminded of, of like the subjects, the themes, the words that, that I approach in different ways and that I watch you all approach in different ways. I feel like, I feel like there's nothing I want to hear more than to hear your thoughts on, you know, if I take some things that, that Annie mentioned on the slash, right, and your feelings about the slash, or if I'm picking up some things that Elini mentioned, your feelings about time. Right, it's like Aswaldo, tell me about time, or Annie, tell me about time, or thinking about Aswaldo's work. It's like, Toby, tell me about love, right, or Elini, tell me about love. Like this is the only way that I want to hear about and know about, and think about love is through this, like, filtered through the undocumented or the formerly undocumented experience. And, you know, thinking too about something that Toby mentioned, you know, tell me about magic. Right, it's like, I don't want to hear about magic, except for how maybe Annie might talk about magic, or, you know, or Aswaldo might talk about magic. Like I said, I think it just activates my brain in a different way and I'm already. I'm already just excited to hear about, you know, what does, what does magic, what does love, what does time and what does slash mean for for someone who has had a very specific, and also varying experiences. And to now that we're into the question portion of this event, I actually wanted to open with a question of my own that builds off of, off of these words to slash time love magic also thinking about something that Toby had said to about how the law intensifies our attention to us and how we in turn intensify our attention to experience and to language. I've been thinking quite a bit too like Alini about time and how time and our, our way of writing through time and thinking about time as it relates to our work. I think just appears in different or likely appears in different ways and manifests in different ways in either our practice or a poem themselves. You know, I think about my own work and how the poems that I wrote and driving without license always feel or have felt urgent to me in a different way than the, than the newer poems that I've been working on my relationship to time also and to when it was that I started submitting my work and when it was I felt like I was allowed to submit my work for publication. You know, sometimes I just held on to poems for a long time because I was either waiting until guidelines were going to change or until other members of my family felt safe or safer to me or I felt safe or safer to the world. So if, if you all might want to speak a little bit to, to your relationship with time and how, how maybe manage those, however it is that you feel that time of your experience with time as someone who is, you know, currently or formerly undocumented, how that manifests in your practice, and or how it manifests in, in your work itself. So I can go ahead. I, because I'm also on DACA, the production for childhood arrival so for me like life always feels like it's a three year interval. And then it's like, okay, next time, like what comes next, because it's like when people ask me what I want to do for like the next five or 10 years I'm always like, I wish I could tell you, because I can't, I can't. It's really like, and you know, there's a track, there's a bit of a tragedy to that like having to be dependent on that sort of like interval like okay when do I have to apply again, which I think for me is like October of next year, even though thankfully now they can do it online and I haven't done my app which I'm really excited about. Just having like that whole process the whole ritual of getting everything together and getting everything like another like and like semi annual annual reminder that Oh, this is my, this is my situation. I definitely manifest in my work in that just the like knowing that there's, I'm not, it's like a luxury even to even think of time in a very long term. So for me like it's very hard to think anything more than like two or three years. So that's how I approach things I would say. Yeah, so, um, my mom married a citizen, I think, eight years ago. So she started the process for me and being Brazilian. It takes less time than being Mexican. So if there's a line, then like, it's by country. And if a family member applies for you defending where which family like we are relation and then it depends on what country you're from. And of course now the pandemic is delaying everything. So, it's been the first time that I've had the luxury to think more long term. And that's how you can apply for an MSA program because I was like, Oh, I'll think I'll be able to finish it. Like, I just never wanted to start one and then be like wait, can am I going to be able to finish it. So I definitely can relate with what Oswego just just said, but also I think when I think about like time in the sense of how much time I have to write or to think about writing. I wrote the first book very frantically. I was working in a religious organization that was becoming more and more conservative and more and more blatant and they're anti-immigrant like sentiments. And, you know, with the former president running and seeing the religious people around me that I thought were my people to gravitate towards him even during the primary felt very like a betrayal. Or even it was like a betrayal but then the secondary feeling was, Oh my gosh, how dumb am I, like, you know, like this, this like need to blame yourself for falling for it. Because that makes me feel better than if it makes me feel better to think this is my fault I shouldn't have fallen for it, then it is for me to think this is how the world is right. There's nothing I could have done. So, I was going every day, driving to Starbucks, even if I was late to work and I was often late to work because I was, I'm depressed and I was not on medication back then so I would be, I would be like, if works are at nine, it would be like 10am I'm getting out of bed and I'm like, I have to go to Starbucks, and I would go for 30 minutes and I would write just frantically. And when I look back at those poems now I'm like, oh yeah, like I needed to get them out where now being in an MFA program in a very liberal environment, feeling relatively much safer. It is different because the poems now don't feel as urgent. And it feels more like I, you know I'm on medication. I'm seeing a therapist. I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like, yeah, as urgent and that's been, that's been interesting because I thought that that's how one would generate poetry is through that urgency. So now, I'm like, oh, that's, I don't know, like it, you know, I was worried at first, because I was like, oh no, like if I don't have that pressure, if I don't have that much conflict or that much fear, will I be able to write poetry. But I think the answer is yes. So, yeah. Yeah, I think this is such a good question. And the question of urgency to is something that I've also thought about because most of the poems in the book were written between 2016 and 2019, when it felt really urgent for me to write and to address more directly. What it meant to be undocumented or what it meant to be on DACA, which I was at the time. I think for me, though, more recently, I think time actually sort of to what Toby mentioned about, I think in one of your poems you mentioned like bending, like time to meet someone and that really spoke to me because the longing that's in these poems and the urgency is actually more related to like family separation and to that kind of separation in space and in time than it really was to any kind of overt political situation or, you know, maybe in tandem. Because 2016 was also the first year that I was able to go back to China and see my family. So it was me and my mom who are here and the whole rest of our family is in China. And I had been, I think, 17 years by that point, and I was able to go because my grandfather was sick. I think it wasn't until then that I realized that there was the me who had left and the 17 years, which of course I lived but there was always this sort of parallel self that was just stationary. And so then to be able to go back and to find that Xi'an China has changed so much during those 20 years, you know those two decades basically that nothing existed except for the people that I was going back to. So something very quickly, I think what really motivated me to write a lot of the family poems was this realization of actually this, this sort of like illusion of the self who stayed put is one that was quickly crumbled by my going back. And poetry I think is incredible because you can, you can bend space time you can astral project you can exist in multiple places and you can conjure a space for you to be with those people. And so, I think that's partially why I was so drawn to poems and to thinking about time in that way. And I think, yeah, the question of time zones and ending times. Yeah, and having to consider both consider your sacrifices and the sacrifice that people are making different, you know, different times of day to kind of me in a middle. It informs my sense of love and it informs my sense of like, acts of care, definitely. One of the, one of the questions about time that fluctuates for me is, especially with separations like there's a there's a way I could say I've been physically apart from my sister for almost 20 years my anniversary in America would be next year 2023 20th anniversary and there's a way that the way the way the numbers accumulate is really it feels disturbing like if like you said when you go from five to 10 years it feels like I was like it's kind of despair. So I think, even though I have, I might never work it out I think there's a sense of like trying to try and cultivate a different sense of time and a different sense of times passage that doesn't feel like it's also creating waste or vanity in this wake. And I think one way that I've tried to do that is to kind of consider all the little gaps and deferrals that on documentation is created in my life as creating interesting products different products and different different products that I would never have had the time or the space to create my own so I think one of the like my older brother and I both being undocumented and not being supported by like counselors or whatever it had a really hard time figuring out how to pay for school for the first the first two or three years of college. So we split, you know we split like a year or two in between a year of school just like how are we going to go between $20,000 for one for one year school if you don't have a scholarship or a financial aid. And I think we process it differently I think those two years made a lot of our awareness of the world like the years that we're being educated. We had to kind of deal with drudgery like dealing with, you know, minimum wage labor dealing with most of your friends being on campuses across the country and you being in your high school town. Making your own meaning out of that experience was really vital for me as a person and like those when I think I think I read the most in my life wasn't I was just I was just working at a restaurant going home, working at my dad's shop going home and like my friends are like I would call my friends once in a while and talk to them. And I think that ultimately really prepared me to take the act of reading and writing much more seriously because that was a real life source for me. I think I could have been much sadder about it than I was and maybe I'm maybe I'm also a little bit introverted side, I didn't have as hard times. But I think I could have been much better about it I didn't have some some like lifeline in the art in the experience of movies, books, music that I have to call it myself. Yeah, just growing up, like, you know, understanding things a little bit more universally a little bit more like in terms of shared discover share pain, as hope like I think I probably went from a little more solipsistic experience of that of like, on documentation separation to be like, Oh, how is this, how is this feeling affecting a wider community like how do I, how do I see this playing out in my parents interactions with me, how do I see this playing out in my siblings, and how can I do something about that, both in the world and on the page. So I think yeah just being being open so like letting time teach you things when it's not the time you want it, not the time you want to have, not the kind I want to have has been important to me in the spaces of like this like ongoing waiting ongoing like expectation and hope that you have to deal with as an immigrant. Yes. Thank you very much I'll come in now to manage maybe some if we have time to address one or two questions. I just wanted to thank you very much again on behalf of so was and the other convenience of the series has been fantastic to be here tonight to listen to your readings and very very emotional and very powerful as well. Unfortunately, the time is a little bit of running out. We could stay here all night to be fair, listening to more of your poems will actually be fantastic. And hopefully you can maybe come back to saw us, you know now traveling is open. Please if you are, you know, planning to come to London reach out to us because it would be really nice to actually see you performing live in front of an audience and as you know poetry is a performance. And so in a way zoom, it is a little bit limited, but it was fantastic to have you tonight. And perhaps I can just try to close the evening with one more questions if you don't mind going a little bit over time. And there is just one question that has been also Ludi our other co convenience not here tonight. She wants to pose this question. So I am positing on behalf of the oven and myself and my colleagues. Our question is about what assumptions about poetry, your work to your system most. So this idea of resistance and came through and perhaps it would be nice for if we can get from you briefly. Unfortunately, if you could maybe expand just in a few words on this question before we close. Thank you. I leave it to all of you to take it one by one. Thank you. I have a lot of things that I feel like I could say about this. But I think right now, the thing that I'm most resistant to is something that Jeanine alluded to earlier that like poetry will not save the world. Poetry is not like the answer. It would be very nice if it was, you know, but it's not. So, I do feel like that's something that I try to resist like I do think that poetry helps human beings come to a better place within themselves and within society so that they can act towards more exploration towards more actual revolution and change in society, but poetry in itself will not do that. And I think that sometimes I see people kind of glorify or go like, oh, yes, and I'm like, it's just, it's just not so. I mean, I don't think that poetry isn't going to do that. And other people's poetry won't so that's my my biggest beef currently. Thank you. I'll say the logic of confession. I don't really, I don't, I mean, I do retell things and I like say things that have happened but I feel like there's a kind of expectation of revelation nudity. I resist because I think it might be replication of a kind of official gaze that I don't like. Related to that I've also been thinking about like the relationship between accessibility and so called experimentation and innovation. And I feel like there's kind of an expectation that goes along with confessional or so called confessional poetry to be really accessible. And that pressure is doubly put on writers of color or like, you know, undocumented poets or, you know, I feel like it's kind of this extra burden to have to bear. And I think for myself that's sort of a place that I thrive and I'm happy in, but I'm also, I feel like we have to allow for like and I think this is something I love that Janina always stresses like the aesthetic variation in how to talk about an experience how to write about an experience. And I think it's similarly like innovation and like kind of how where can be liberatory. Often it isn't like kind of a direct confrontation with the thing that we're resisting right that I think to be your word was like exceeding kind of the logic of the carceral state and I think maybe that excess is you know, it can be fun it can be it can be sort of wild and it can not look like what we expect and that's that's sort of where I'm aiming for these days. And for me, I come just regionally like where I'm at like the big thing that I find myself in is like, Latino poetry like Latino Americans specifically Mexican American experience that I see that I tend to come across the most. And of course, being Mexican and being in the States like, I guess I would be part of that school of thought is just that when I think about like the motifs that I go to like the symbolism that are very very often done like the drafts of early drafts like, you know, for the ego who called me my East like people hated the title. And I can tell why, because it was just like an emphasis on like corn and like, you know, like over emphasis on like monarch butterflies for example like in the US like that's a big symbol of like migration is beautiful, even though not really like it's actually kind of terrible, but I've always wanted to I've always resisted the urge to say like that. And like, Mexican American poetry for example has like tapped out everything in terms of like being able to present something new as a different product. And so my goal is like even if it's, even if it is like the same motif like the monarch poem for example like I made it to a point where it's like, it wasn't about migration it was just like the physicality of butterfly, how that looks and just using nectar as like a very vivid sexual metaphor. But so there's that like me trying to like push that just a little bit to go against the notion that there's nothing really to left to write about within that particular school of poetry. That's how I'm going to do it, whether I succeed or not we'll check it in like five or six years. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you very much. You will answer like the question very, very thoroughly. And I'm not sure if my colleagues that perhaps Amma and Fazzanadi you want to say and have some comments. And also I wanted Janine perhaps to come in for some final comments as well before we close as the chair of today and it would be nice to. Okay, so I leave it to, I think, yeah, Janine do you want to perhaps make some final comments. Really, I just want to thank you all and thanks so as for, for, for creating this space, I mean we've been talking so much about time and, you know, I just think, again, about our relationship to time, even just in terms of organizing these kinds of events. I mean, it feels, when we get to do something like this it feels much more than, you know, just putting an entry into my calendar it really feels like people have to like bend space and time to align the portals for all of the endocrine poets and all the endocrine occupants fellows to be able to meet at a particular moment and kind of like squeak through this like portal that's been made for us to share the space. You know, as I, as I mentioned earlier and also I think as the other fellows have have have brought up throughout this event. We don't all get to talk outside of email very often and, you know, events like this make it possible for us to see each other, and sometimes to get to know each other and to to hear each other's work. And so really just, I'm just, I'm just so thankful. And I know that she's here in the audience somewhere. I want to just also extend our thanks to Esther Lynn who helped create, who helped kind of bridge this partnership with so as. Yeah, so yeah, thank you it's just just been really lovely. Hi, I just wanted to say thank you so much to your I am fortunate came a bit late but I was just so inspired with your work and I think I'd like to echo what Angelica was saying it'll be so amazing to see you perform this in person it would be wonderful experience and I look forward to exploring more of your work and reading more. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for my thanks and particularly for highlighting what I believe is that all human experiences real and important and I think that's that's that's the essence of what I think we are all human beings and all of our experiences are important. And, and, and real and meaningful so thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you for my co convener and thank you to Janine for chairing this incredible panel. And yes unfortunately we are already a bit of a time. So we said, please, let's stay connected and let's keep writing poems, please, and please come to us to share more with our students. And we really look forward to to see you again and to, and to read more about your work and your poems. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you so much. And thank you. Bye. Okay, bye guys. I just say the event is being recorded and will be available soon on YouTube and I will, I will connect with all of you. Good night and good day. Bye. Bye. Bye for now.