 Thank you for coming and thank you to the library for having this wonderful event and thank you so much for inviting me Joe, I love I love events that are a confluence of more than one art and here we have this intersection of visual art and spoken word and poetry and music and I think it talks about the connections between all of these different Medium media. I also want to say a quick word about Najib Jo Hakim He's an incredibly talented artist who is unbelievably humble So one of the things I invite you to do is make sure you look at the show and then just be noisy about it Because he's not the best self promoter I have to say and I really think that this would be like time magazine stuff and I know how hard it is to self promote But I really really admire his work and he was really instrumental me getting the cover for this house my bones I'm going to read two poems one of them is not from this house my bones It's a new poem and both poems I'm going to read are based on visual images that I have seen and The first one needlework is one week of news about a year and a half ago Remember when the the girls were kidnapped in Nigeria and taken the Boku harm people But it was that week and there was a bunch of things going on with ISIS and with Palestine And it was just one week before we were focusing on the nonsense that we're focusing on now Where the images of what was going on in the United States just started to Go into my pores and kind of toxic ways so I tried to find a healing for it So this one's called needlework and it's broken up into four sections and the first section is called LP And I think everybody hears old enough to know what an LP is Yeah Proceeded downloads. It's about this week. Okay needlework number one LP a needle drop one groove aria The mother's whalebone holler Rocketing into mob song Men in orange marched him on to the beach a throat cut bodies breathing beneath the sand perforating singed to ear The cymbal clatter the rumble a collapsing not just of the building not just the home the bones Imparched pilings We want to refuse the blood soaked terrain the crack on the glass of his photograph His brother shaved close for the camera which is not different from gorillas hacking the bush and then their backs Number two tattoo There is a chorus of ghost voices of girls lost Puncturing in fine notes Silhouettes where we pull scarves low to avert youth and beauty and still again stolen Seekers have lost their way or perhaps incentive for what our girls, but little birds fallen from nests Some forget but their mothers would cut their faces over the wounds where heartbeats flushed three Injection I cannot seal my eyes nor block my ears My veins raise easy to find when one says food and another says gas and another says my father burned before my eyes firecracker drones Celebrate their inability to distinguish farmer from soldier child from warrior The warmth in the blood breeds dissidents Flowing is dynamic constant poison moves fast a terrifying addiction for acupuncture Decorate me with needles Stitch my mouth in broader my forehead give them all my name all names distinct as their laughter Or the way I shied even as they were gone Pierce my chakras with their voices run maps along my meridians where they were last seen alive track my G and extract Elegy I choose remembering it cuts the skin impatient Morse into the saddest story ever told Again and again and as small as this we bleed and scar and bleed again I have really upbeat work And the second and last poem I'm going to read is based on an email from Suhera mad who's another is a Palestinian poet who? Whose birthday it is today, which is? Just coincidental She was in Palestine making a film called salt of the sea. I don't know. Does anybody remember that film? Yeah, so she was there and they were the film crew was having trouble all the time They were under siege all the time and she was staying in Ramallah and she had a favorite those of you know Ramallah know the Nazareth cafe so that one that's at the street that splits and She used to go have her fool there every morning and she sent me an email Well, she sent me an email most every day while she was there and she sent me this email Three days ago the Israeli special forces assassinated a young man who'd been wanted and in some kind of hiding in Ramallah They shot him in the feet and in the back as he was leaving the Nazareth the restaurant my spot I went by the next day to sit with the men all whom greet me familiar now They watched their friend walk out and then bleed to death for 45 minutes in front of their shop The ambulance driver was shot trying to reach him June 1st 2007 after breakfast What can you do but sit and survey the tracks where the ambulance had stopped yards away from the body and See the flies gather where their driver was struck by bullets The smoke in the air lingers day old stale sorrow the kind that settles into your throat Can't be coughed out even when singing the old songs that erupt from the chest the roughest way out The notes as hard as pebbles Your hangout where the fool simmers fresh parsley and scallions in pots on blue flames Throws a shadow on a map of blood drawn on the sidewalk Where X his feet are shot and X he is hit in the back and X the ambulance arrives And X the driver cannot navigate the storm of fire and fear and X the streets fill with mourners A matter of course the words fly rocks and melodies Each body is its own island and Waters gather round splashing against the shores pushing a million heartbeats against the silence exhaling a thousand Zagaluta Pumping into the lungs everything they have Children are lost everywhere and their bodies form land masses a new diagram That must be inset into our geographies so we know where we stand Sip tepid water slow now Wait for the beans to cool the metal of the spoon stains your mouth leaves sulfur on your tongue You cannot eat here anymore and you cannot leave Thank you