 For those who don't know, we are right next to a statue right now in this building. It is between the main library and the Asian Art Museum. Let me see if I can figure out what the directions are. I think it's that way. I think that's right. That way? Something like that. Anyway, a prone native man being menaced by a vaquero and a priest, we decided maybe it was time to get rid of that bit of legacy furniture. Everybody's got some, right? You end up inheriting some stuff from the parents or the grandparents that's emotionally fraught and weighted and is also just not going with anything you want to say about the way you live. Sometimes you've got to store that stuff. So I'm now looking for that file, which I know is in here. Here we are. I decided after the Board of Appeals and Entitlements, you can't write it, can you? The Board of Appeals and Entitlements in the city decided that the Arts Commission, who technically owns the statue, and the Historical Preservation Society, who has control over taking things like that down, didn't get to decide that so they put a stay on the removal. And I wrote a poem every day between that and the time they decided to re-hear that case. There are 55 of them, but I'm not going to read them all. Yes, it is early days. For the Appeal Board, who decided on April 18, 2018 that the early days statue should stay in the San Francisco Civic Center. San Francisco is a sanctuary city, but reminds my sons to cower. Cower, before colonial religion, before land grabbing industry, all are welcome, some on their backs. San Francisco panned out of mud and water, now curls in mythology, seductive and moral on the Bay Shore, and smiling, wears a diamond necklace of Winning the West down Market Street. If you will not kneel, you will be kneeled. If you will not submit, you will be cast in bronze, submitted. Our skins are still traded in for treasure at City Hall in San Francisco. The second early day. For over 500 years, we are asked to die. We are put in a position to die. We are actively killed. Mis-history, done person, delanguage. Keep talking, everyone learns something. Keep laughing. There aren't enough of you to fill a comic book. Humane treatment is a numbers game San Francisco's Board of Entitlement assures us. The third early day. Civic art helps to establish community value, sometimes the value is cultural supremacy. Less thought has been given to removing this statue than to removing a window when a statue is a window. A symbol, a call to arms when a statue is a window into a tradition of erasure and abuse. When a statue is a celebration of the cleverness of theft, the braveness of armed invasion, the nobility of enslaving others, the nobility of celebrating it. The fourth early day. I have to tell you I got really cranky by the 55th early day. I was so angry. The fourth early day. A statue is not a library, it's not a book, but if it were low income housing it'd be gone by now. Removing a statue is not burning a book with or without the statue we will remember and you have already forgotten. The fifth early day. Taking down a statue isn't genocide anymore than removing a building as genocide and how many buildings have been raised in the last three years. How many buildings over 50 years old? How many tent cities? How many people over 50, their histories thrown into trash trucks? Sweep, they call it. Don't touch the bronze casting, the metal that doesn't bleed, the metal that isn't hunted back to its village and dragged to a mission for forced labor. The culture of statues is safe. The sixth early day. Civic statues, it is said, are not fully understood by the Arts Commission artists but are by someone descended from museum owners. Museums. Cabinets of curiosity. Collections of relics. Loot of the ages. As if control were understanding. As if owning was understanding. As if a statue were a kidnapped woman or a flayed skin. Civic statues convey honor on events or people, commemorate, establish the values of the community. What stands in our Civic Center in San Francisco? What does San Francisco stand for? The seventh early day. Twenty-one missions from San Diego to Sonoma. Cenotaphs with rounded numbers of those worked to death, alienated to death. The Catholics kept good notes. But these relics mythologized colonization by a medallion at the gift shop. You won't find one with an image of the Cenotaph with the numbers of our beloved dead. Nearby strip malls, wineries, missions style. But San Francisco feels that there are too few reminders. The eighth early day. And this is going to be the last of this series because I start getting really irritated. If civic art was simply a matter of art, we could have this discussion. If people deciding how other people were represented was simply a matter of self-expression, we could talk over my kitchen table into the small hours. We could laugh and compare and opine. If a small group of people not including any representatives of another group are deciding how that group are seen by every tourist and visiting dignitary one of the most storied cities in the western hemisphere. A group that is still colonized whose members are still habitually raped at a rate more than twice the national average. Whose young people see so little hope that the teen suicide rates are described as at crisis levels. Then this is not a discussion about art because you're not just deciding on a sculpture. You're deciding our worth. This is a petty exercise of power and you have leashed your reputations to that story and that statue. Fifty-five whole days. Doug would come downstairs and see me going at my computer screen as I was making sure I had the details of California history correct because although I am indigenous I am not a California indigenous person. I am an indigenous person who lives in California and I owed it to the people who host me in this place not to get it wrong. You are more than welcome sis. So as long as we've gone down this road this is a little lighter but not a whole lot. It's called the butterfly war and if you don't know about it look up the Mariposa war. The butterfly war never ended. This tension and the seers keep burning flame pressing tips into each hidden place that Tanaya knew and the fires pass the people. Scatter seed. Scatter seed to hold the earth down to hold it down in the valley in Mariposa Grove. There is a fire and it reads the stories of these hills out loud in voices too terrible, too airless for understanding. It takes the trees by the throat and reads them ring by ring into the finger holds that water has and the beating of indefinable wings of flame. These winds of burning take non-human prayers to other gods on that smoke and every bit of hope in history is told and retold in cracked rock and charcoal stands of trees. Oh that's okay. I guess I did it to you didn't I Linda? Once upon a time I used to tell people that if they didn't applaud I'd pout. We are in day eight, day eight of nine straight days performing and I'm like yeah yeah okay applause whatever. It's horrible but people keep asking me what the laureate position is like what the job is and what it does and much of what it's done for me is that I am almost entirely self-contained as a poet now which is not what I would have predicted. At the same time I am almost never by myself. This is called safest houses. Houses are a matter of faith. We sat once over the reservoir there's a parking lot there. Now that sucking heat of August and the impulse of plans and just over the ridge like a ruined cathedral like the land is burning of the codices in the dark and branchless stands of last year's fire ranked down the hillside. We were heading to a house, a trusted thing that had been carefully preserved with cats and computers and paintings intact past waterfalls which I should maybe have grown out of by now but still that long drop the freedom of water tossing itself off of hillsides the bravery of water the odd safety of houses made of wood and the idea the sacrifice trees just visible from the road an amulet underfoot. Navigation. It's hard to tell if this is fog or prayer smoke and the singing of flowers and horns already in some places these poems whispering into snakes some dissolving going who knows where or falling into the dark of buried mirrors. Try to dream the things that your rebuena plants dream when the new printed storm runs fingers through the cypress and reaches along hidden routes and quiet water songs in the cracks in the serpentine. They find salamander prayers in layered stone coins lost in the fret of post earthquake with slumped brick and the full panic of witness and dynamite. These hills hold down hold down and breathe storm and smile up into the rain eyes and change again. Cusp. Morningstar. The redwood has caught her for the moment this ancestor net a cold game on the cusp of a day that I know will be hot will bake the tiny tomatoes on the vine and set lavender and rosemary free ripples of early autumn that break out in orange butterflies. Contraband. There is no need to forbid the songs on a Monday morning with the cold shivering the lights near the mint and the braced gray buildings with their red blinking signals to airplanes. Beware. I think of a fortress as an old fashioned thing and in a way it is, but we're not singing and the barricades are up in some pretense of offence and the boats are in the bay and the songs are not being sung although we are allowed and revolution is a T or a jacket and doesn't lend support and still the street lights are trembling as the woman under them does not and we will measure her worthiness for help her parents and her choices the mess and bold fact of her there and she isn't singing either not soup or poem no song of any kind. How many people lived in California during the drought in the 70s? I know there are three of us. None of the fountains ran. They were all empty. Panic is a luxury for those who are only in danger seasonally. Relax between the battles. Some people don't want your help don't want you in the neighborhood they have chosen from a catalog. There is a heat that only comes from these sidewalks and nowhere else. I can only sleep with my head on the shoulder of a cousin these days. Parallels I understand. You explain to me what's safe away from this kitchen table. The texture and quality of your words we weave the weaving time is here sift pull edit manage stand with me now in the ceremony of living by breathing water the rain is coming. Relax between battles smile or help there is a heat that only comes from these sidewalks what's safe weaving time is here manage the rain is coming underfoot and sidewalk among the tall ships wrapped tight in the earth now northeast towards the recreated waterfront a teacup full of atmosphere charming historical and the singer holds the mic so you can sing along we all know all of the words fog horn signal so that you can avoid bumping into people their tents on the sidewalk and unsightly need that could make you feel almost human these ships remember ocean tight quarters sweat and sway some days they tremble writing waves of imagination we made believe we made real these bricks as solid as anything things being what they are could burst into moths or shrouded restaurant tables in narrow streets a palm full of seeds that every newcomer thinks they've discovered I myself have been discovered in every decade of my life try not to break too many dreams on the rocks or the tent poles it can take a moment to get your footing I'm going to read this you know I say this regularly but when you write a really political poem about something very specific you hope that you stop having to read it at some point unfortunately please tell my family I'm alive it's hard to know where we are with everything broken and scattered war and weather will do that and there's weather to come we need to decide what we all understand and what's local survived like a single tea cup it's always strange what's spared and what's taken the chair has come apart and roof pieces are mixed in with spilled sugar but that horrible quilt of your mother's is okay storm sound has marked me and I'll never stop hearing it shocking now the idea safe as houses and we did feel safe we did pull our ideas around us like wooden walls and we thought we knew coming down into Eureka valley this hillside remembers being wild and the trees still talk about the orchard that replaced purple bunch grass and rattlesnake the arroyo salamanders coil under ceramic pots and sing songs about wet years under the bay white roses grow from rootstock after the grafts failed and the bearded iris bolted every ten years or so saffron crocus bloom under the Maribel plums looking for something this okay I'm going to do three more I am another who the ground swallows whole I am another who the ground swallows whole who learned to walk an expectation from you I am one who writes long-winded goodbyes knowing where the escape hatch is and not pulling the handle that our limbic systems are on overload and we can always smell the summer south with all of the ripe and rot and bloom for me the stars are never the same number twice no matter how carefully I count and now without the other pointing finger surely not that the starlight is a memory and may twinkle in or out and there are these rooms and houses that we can describe and visit but still we know only the names are changed only the names so if I say Norma Jean who do you think I'm talking about Marilyn Monroe this is a different Norma Jean this is Norma Jean Croy who is a political prisoner in California another native Californian an indigenous Californian native Californian from here out here when Norma Jean was in prison witnessed to a thing declared not to have happened accomplished to nothing and shot in the back the ceremonies continued and sacred caves were subject to gradual water I've been seduced by water and this slides palms over a place I would otherwise stand in a place I have stood in wearing sandals water to my knees and prayed child thoughts into the listening ears of water sank a small hand like Sirius into the silt to find the next unfired shell I let that bullet rest there between life and heart and fate lines and stared at such an expensive thing turned to water that licks the leftover caves of lead mines metal finding its level and later after Norma Jean's lovers have run similar hands over the scar just there on my own back luckily placed where there was no threat to spine or lung if their hands were clever they found it brass unstamped and some have left it and some have temporarily pulled it from my flesh and curiosity no way to explain what we hold on to no way to explain how we carry our fears this is a poem I seriously hope that I don't have to read for very long it's called parent and child cycle one when the first pain hit I went up on my toes birth dances you and all of the people that will breathe at you speaking for myself they were of no help we did that dance together my son and I became two people it's another kind of storytelling two we took the stereotypes in our hands and tore them up the worlds we've created between us parent and child person and person you curled there and whispered stories of healing into my fever dreams that have adventured three cleaning grandpa's desk we found the Mary of Shestahova her black skin rendered in silver metal ISIS by any other name still brought her lover back from the dead and claimed a son from him ISIS of sky and wisdom wrapped in blue as I have been just feeling the heartbeat the damp skin the wonder of a new person four we carefully mark the places where the world changes pack our borders, our toothbrushes walking shoes rewritten in every watershed every story shed children of corn walking north the sons of corn perform the magic as they were taught and the people were fed we are dusted with pollen we are walking north five the child shows me the mark of the scorpion on his leg I show him the mark of the spider on mine we have walked dangerous miles he and I separate parts of the same story the gods took a handful of cornflower, some blood and we are born danced, went up on our toes you may have been born differently but this is our story six children in cages dys prayer and genetic memory offers a panic stolen children the sacred geometry shattered we carry our borders we who are blood and corn we reach across rivers we call our cousins we burn the copal seven this part of the story isn't written yet we are all going to have to write it together thank you