 Good evening, beautiful people. Thank you for joining us this evening. We appreciate you spending your time with us and joining us for the virtual home jam at SFPL live. I'm going to be your librarian host tonight and just do some quick library housekeeping. Our on the same page for November and December is Elaine Castillo's America's Not the Heart, a beautiful book. Lovely characters, strong female characters, a little queer tilt, and it's just a really great book recommended for high schoolers all ages above. And Elaine will be in conversation with Ismail Muhammad on December 15th at 7pm. Join us. Alright, can everyone see my screen and hear me by the way in. You can see Vanessa but not the slides. I don't know if you want to show those. Not the slides. I do want to show some slides. Let's try this again. That's okay because I also did not let the folks in. So let's try again. Hello everybody. Welcome welcome beautiful people can I get a yes you can hear me in the chat box and see my slide. And somebody from the audience would be great. Welcome friends. Yay. Welcome. All right so let's try again. Hi everyone here tonight and I want to welcome you to the MC the land of the alone tribal people and acknowledge the many raw nutrition only tribal groups and families as the rifle stores and the lands in which we reside here in the Bay Area. So also wants to acknowledge and make sure everybody's aware that we're not a neutral institution at the library, and that we stand in solidarity with black lives matter movement and support collective action, then structural systemic and institutional racism in our own house in our community. As a library we are here to provide our community with useful and factual information on both the topics of first person as well as black lives matter. I'll put a link into the chat later with a link to today's intro and the document and links to upcoming events that ffl, including upcoming poem jam. And now some library housekeeping, I would like to tell you about some events that are coming up our November December on the same page which is a by monthly read we encourage all of us to read the same book is Elaine Castillo's America's part. Elaine will be in conversation on December 15 with Ismail Mohammed. So please come join us pick up the book now available at your library to go, or at your library, friends of the libraries online bookstore, or your favorite local bookstore. I'm with this book available at all of those places I just mentioned. This is our one city one book campaign. And we are so excited to have chosen Chanel Miller for her book, know my name. This book is powerful. It's heavy. I suggest you pick it up now. And if you do not know who Chanel Miller's name is you probably know her perpetrator's name. Unfortunately, more, but it is a story about sexual assault and her overcoming those and her dealings with the court system, and all of it. And she does a lot of healing through art. So please pick up the book now at one of those locations or at SSL to go start reading now and look forward to events coming up in March and April, lots of events surrounding this book, but all sorts of events of the overarching theme. We will be having a book club Monday for how we go home voices from the indigenous north. This is from our friends that voices of voice of witness. You may now pick up library materials. And for all my library family out there I love you, I miss you, and please everybody mask up and stay safe for not just my library family, but for everybody who is out there working in our cities. You know, serving us on a daily. Be diligent. And I want to mention the next poem jam is going to be all may think Afro futuristic poets. And this is part of our more than a month. It's called History Month celebrations running from January through February. I've put the links there in this document, but I will also put them in the chat. And you can see those readers, ishmael reed. Devorah major major. All of them. So please, please come this is what a hard lineup. So, don't miss it. Thank you for that great intro. Yeah, the Afro futures poets are going to be incredible. A watch the four me just some amazing people. It has been my incredible pleasure during the pandemic to bring poetry from anthologies and collective efforts. Because I think community and besides and community is incredibly important in this moment. In light of that, it was an enormous pleasure to be able to feature Molly fist fabulous book. California fire and water which it's a really great collection of work and I'm just going to hand it over to Molly so that she can outline what's going on now but welcome everybody all the readers all the audience thank you so much for being here. Thanks Kim. Thank you, San Francisco public library johns Molly. It is so. I mean libraries are just it. That's all I have to say. I'm so delighted to be able to read with you and have all my friends here. We are 21 of us from the anthology which has 145 contributors to it. Our poems written by Californians from the ages of eight to 85. And the book is part of a project I did with a poet's laureate fellowship from the Academy of American poets that I won last year. It's designed to help us face uncertainty and express our personal responses to the climate crisis. The book provides solace and resilience as well as information and it's actually a great way to show people from out of the area. What it's like to live in these wildfire times here. California fire and water will be available at the San Francisco public library very soon. And you can also purchase it through any independent bookstore. It's online at the usual suspects. You can get it for me if you want to at Molly Fisk calm. A percentage of the profits goes to produce more copies to give California public and prison and school libraries. And it also a percentage of the profits are donated to the Nissan tribe on whose unseated land I live and work. There's so many readers tonight that we're not going to be giving out bios and information like that. You can find all that kind of thing these days on the web anyhow. We're just going to introduce each other by name. Every poet will read their poem in the anthology and one by someone who isn't here tonight in person. I am hoping to feel as though there's just a great big wave of poetry washing over us. And we're going to see who I hope is unmuting himself right now. You're muted, David. The silence before the wave. How's that. I'm sorry about that. My poem is called cadaver dog. A dog is barking in paradise sniffing scorched earth, hellish air, his handler shouting urgently over here. Man woman child, metal prongs thoughtfully finger suspect ash and soil. Rake up nothing but the mute remains of a smartphone, plus all that's left of a wedding ring, the diamond. Nothing gold can stay. Cadaver dog's gusses sense of smell is 1000 times keener than yours. As he savers a scent so redolent of all his master's search for. That intimations of humanity flood his canine mind and heart. This essence materialize toss a ball and frisbee share a strip of bacon. Go for a ramble in the park. Good boy. How lovingly a dog has done what dogs are taught to do. The mind is tooth or nail or bit of sullied flesh to bag for DNA man's best friend is left to grieve alone. Not that there's time to how Gus gets a pat on his head, but no reward. The search party moves on. And this poem is called fire season. This is a poem by Susan Kelly. Driving home from the ocean foam coils like Lacey sand dollars pasted to the wet shore fog banks boogie boarding in with the evening surfers. We see smoke clouds, sooty sky islands in the distance. Wildfire tides rolling toward us from the dry valley. Grasses parched hillsides. Hattus flies, midges, leaf hoppers, the snout mobs, the click beetles, the swallow tails and morning cloaks of the wolf and the recluse, the orb weavers, the silk slingers, all those non human universes exploding into flame. How we breathe them in, how they drift into our lungs on wisps of char vapor, while firefighters tried to hold the line and evacuated humans weight in uncertainties wings. Some days I feel our aging hearts could be seen as dry umbels of drought stressed sweet fennel as spike lids of quaking grass or broom. And our next poet is Ruth Bavetta. Okay. Am I on? Okay, my poem is heat, heat. And the sun said, let there be fire, and there was fire. And the fire said, let there be wind. And the wind was throbbing. And the beast of the flames full taught over the hills said not to the chaparral and nil to the coyote. And the coyote ran and the rabbits ran and the deer and the rattlesnake and the quail ran. And the wind sprang from its kill and tunlic the eaves and the rafters and the roof. And the smoke was air. And the air was smoke. The air was our bodies. It was our shadows against the sky. And I'm going to read God of Roots by Ellen Bath. Meanwhile, the heat and light of a flaming star rushed 93 million miles to reach us. Baby girls are born with their 400,000 egg cells already formed. Otters keep grooming their guard here, whirling the water, working deep, working air into the deep underfur. Beluga whales swim along the earth's magnetic field. Chicks pip a circle of holes counterclockwise around the blunt end of their eggs, pressing with their feet and heaving with their shoulders. Larvae eat their way through the soft mezzo fill of oak leaves, leaving a trail of dark feces in their wake. Tart juice swells under the rinds of lemons. And under the earth, the God of Roots goes on painting the lustrous fringe with a brush so delicate, only one sable hair. And so there were all the time in the world. And I'm introducing next is Judy Bebalar. And I'm going to begin with a poem by Dhanusha Menek Lemeris. It's called Glass. It's the small things that haunt oranges, because my mother used to peel them for me, slip the rough sections in my mouth. Lucky's, because of the wayward boy who lit my first, leaning against the railing of the pier. Oh, solomio, wafts up from the downstairs apartment. Now it means all those summers. Can't they just turn it off? I walk through Queen Anne's lace in late September, down to the cove where I used to meet a man who was dying. That flower now in my vocabulary of loss. What doesn't in time enter grief's lexicon. When I think of our house after the fire, all I see are pools of pink glass, once our ice cream bowls melted on the ruins. And my poem is called Morning, and you may know that one word for a flock of butterflies is kaleidoscope. I didn't, I love it. Morning. It waits now before birdsong, a patient stillness. It waits for a sky full of music, as it was at the old dawns here. Waits for a paired monarchs, a trio, a winged kaleidoscope. Waits for itself as it was before DDT, before Monsanto and monocrops, before the plundered forests. As after fire, green returns, morning light holds possibility. And that one Anna swallowtail my husband photographed and framed yesterday's gift out of the blue says perhaps it is not yet too late. And the next reader is Jean Burson. We can't hear him. Okay, can you hear me. Yes. Okay, I'm sorry. Thank you, Judy. It's great. Let me get rid of this. My poem is, it's called hard to plan for outside the tire shop waiting room, a sparrow underneath the faded Subaru sips from a puddle of condensation dripping from the air conditioner. Smoke from the fires is everywhere. Have a seat. The young woman behind the counter takes care of business. I'll get them right on it. The dude next to me into his phone scrolls through pics with his expert thumb. An older lady across from me fidgeting with the clasp on her purse looks at me, her face full of apology. I smile and look away. Our shop is full of the smell of new tires. We have coffee mate and hunting magazines as we wait and are grateful to have made it and not to be stuck on the side of the road. I look out the window again. The sparrow stays in the shade under the bumper. Her beak open for the heat as if she's trying to sing. I've got to read a poem by Justin to go in fourth grade. I'm San Diego. It's called world wildfire. The heat. Sucking up trees. Burning down houses into pieces of ash and dust. Electric wires cracking and exploding. Bursting and detonating into wildfires. Animals are suffering. Plants too. Wildfires are taking down earth. Getting stronger and more furious. I want to save the world. Create the world. Help put it back together. And I'd like to introduce Eileen Casanato. Thank you. Thank you, Eugene. My poem is Fireborn. I once went wild over repurposed things. Tweeds, weeds, driftwood, silvery warmwood got worked into frames, foot gear, chandeliers. My favorite though is a floor lamp from a limb trimmed from an old manzanita. The color of burnished red pear. The child of the last wildfire. Evergreen and unsparing. Our gratitude for the little apples. And the many equally wild and dressed things that fed on them. That charm of hummingbirds. That grist of bees. That flutter of butterflies. You are the kindling and the offering. The time-worn prayer about the movement of air. The next poem is by Muad Belkalfia, fourth grade. But now to fire. Once I was the mist in the clouds. I was the one drop of rain. But now I am the storm. But now to fire. But now to smoke. Next, please welcome Brad Crenshaw. Thank you. I would like to read my poem. It's called Tell You What. I'd like to dedicate it to my friends and friends of friends so terribly affected by the CZU complex fires this summer. And Bonnie Dune, Felton and Boulder Creek. Tell you what. Tell you what, the air loft is falling. Here it is, October, November. The mountains speak again about hydraulic jumps and fires. The power is already down. Personally, I'm on the wharf in Santa Cruz, but even so I'm listening for downslope winds beginning high before descending in a sinking train of music aiming overland and tumbling toward me on the coast. I take a lung full in, sampling for smoke arriving from Sonoma. All of us are breathing it. If I were to die and then return to earth as horses, running with the speed of money, I would fly the flames behind me flaring into canyons, sweeping through the prehistoric fuels and towns to overtake the traffic trapped on chains of roads as conifers exploded overhead. Are they beautiful, these evergreens ringed in elemental force, breathed demonically? A problem I will leave unsolved. If I chose a bird, I'd be a phoenix to come out alive and recognized on thermals rising over vineyards and incendiary homes. Really, I'd be chasing safety, same as residents, evacuating underneath the haze and rain of soot to reach as refugees the temporary camps popping up and populating open spaces. Lanterns sparkle here and there. Someone lucky saved his ass when chaos drafted every buoyant movable alive and separated friends and families. Circumstances fly apart so fast. Fathers on their dying phones are calling children still en route. Sisters hold out hopes for detours full of serious grace, which, I'm here to say, are unattainable in country currently alight and commonly reset in violent conflagration. Such derision drives us all to ground. The next poem is called My Old House by Marcus Wright, sixth grade in the James Monroe Elementary School in Sonoma County. Come through the dark lane of cold air like a ghost flowing through your bones. Look around at the huge tree looking down on you. Listen carefully for the sound of sobbing. Walk down the park until you see a park. Run up to the park to see if it's broken. Smell the rain falling in the midnight sky. Touch the rust on the monkey bars. You can make out a human figure of a boy. The boy is sitting on what used to be a crimson swing. Looking at a house 10 feet away from the park. Hear the sobbing again, but it sounds close. You can see the boy crying by the shining tears falling down. And that boy misses his old house. And that boy is me. Thank you. I would like now to introduce the next poet, Judy Crow. Hello. I would like first to read Kirsten Casey's poem learning about trees. Notice first that they are tall beyond the power poles that bend and spark under the weight of January snow. The trees know their yoga have stretched and bowed only to return square shoulder improper posture. Please recognize the deep moles blackened by lightning strikes in the thick bark that was once sapling skin. Now ragged and squirrel abused a home and a maypole and a scratching post. Most of the roots are hidden bulging wooden veins. They hold trees to the ground heavy primitive ship anchors eventually rusting and rotting through. The trees are old enough they fall because their insides are now beetles, or the wind shifts to the north, or there is not enough water, or the late winter soil is too drenched and has to let go. You've already seen the diagram know the arrows path, all of that oxygen and carbon dioxide. You've read that slim green book about a boy who sold his tree and pieces and ended up old on a stump. This isn't to warn you, but just to let you know that sometimes they outlive the people in their shade with their wide trunks and mysterious rings and tree top perspectives. Sometimes they burn cracking and shaking hands in a bluster of sparks. Sometimes people carve letters into them a scar they cannot read in a language that is not their own. Kirsten Casey learning about trees. And my poem is fire season. Learning about air caught in pockets arrested and snared in and o gases jostling warm brown wet air in half cup of mornings dark roast or haze in closed up house smoky a different brown or in runaway fires raging miles away up forest canyons, the air there red hellish hummingbird sits from red paddled blue glass feeder, then perches on potato rock on deck rail, then rises to dip beak and drink, then perches, then drinks and more cool blue and whirrs up and away air and water warming thickening inside him or her. White hibiscus blossom purple hearted cradle smoky air. My lungs to our browning air in my empty cup gone air in that forest beyond heat still angry still read. Last night from finished air and in different black sky shot stars hundreds of stars heedless random too cold for comfort. Thank you. And Molly fist will read next. This is particulate matter. If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads melted dashboards and tail lights oil pans window glass seatbelt clasps. The propane tanks in everyone's yards, though we didn't hear them explode. Our 13 insulation paint inside and out. The liquor stores plastic letters in puddled colors below their charred sign. Each man made soul of every shoe in all those closets. The laundromats washers round metal doors. But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library, everything they contained. How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once blue sky. How many linoleum acres. Not to mention the Valley Oaks, the Ponderosa's all the wild hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones, their final cries, and our neighbors, so many particular precious irreplaceable lives that despite ourselves, we're inhaling. Jack, I'm going to read this poem now. You have to move over. Eddie. Goodbye. This is Ali Vonder's poem. A letter from fire. And last year she was in the ninth grade at Nevada Union High School in Grass Valley. A letter from fire. Sorry. I came out of nowhere and destroyed everything. Like a typhoon against a stick house. I was just hungry. I cannot be tamed though. It's like the Yuba River in winter, rushing and rising over land, sweeping away anything in its wake. I want to be friends, but everything I touch turns to ash. I tried to warn you. As my hunger ran wild. My bright red and orange lit up the sky, like a warning siren going off. But still I was too quick. No warning could ever prepare you for my destruction. The wind tried to knock me down and the lakes and rivers tried to surround me, but they did not avail. My hunger dismisses them as a slight annoyance in the whole scheme of things and ravages your home, your family. Sorry, I cannot do anything but watch. As if I were a fawn, witnessing her mother hit by a car, unable to stop it, unable to move. Sorry. Now please welcome Casey Fitzsimmons. Thank you, Molly. My poem is called Into the Thunder. It's self made wind cracks trees. It's din, it drowns the thin pattern. Shall I start again? It's self made wind cracks trees. In its din, it drowns the thin pattern of falling cinders. The dog whines, claws clattering. You cough, crouch, hold your breath. Your fright becomes my dread. A thing so elemental, no water could possibly relieve it. A thonic force belonging to nature. It is not thought but this deep loathing of palpable pervading horror that will not be quenched. My pictures, singe and curl. My walls and pages tear and crumble. Dissolved to silt. My speeches, hiss and fizzle, finally pop. Opposed across the chasm of what I do not want, will not have, refuse to be reconciled to, cannot be rid of, fire and water roar. Do away with all I thought I would remember. I'd like to read a poem by Opal Palmer Addisa. It's called Defying Fate. They warned us, yes they did. But we refuse to listen. The location was beautiful. High above everyone remote, peaceful. Our perfect getaway, and it was for 10 years. Now I wade through ashes, hoping to find evidence of a life lived, a future we had bargained on. Next up is Taylor Graham. Taylor. Thank you. My poem is for my auto mechanic Mike. One. Small death. You can't help turning the firefighter back from the big one. Big one. You brush the question off like a spark. Char. A buddy kicks a blackened stone out of the way, but it's no stone. It's charred alive just breathing. Burned raccoon, not moving. Your son tells his buddy, end it with your Pulaski. The buddy can't make himself do it. So your son kills it, but that can't kill it in his brain. He has no choice but to tell you and you tell me. The beast dying lives third hand charred in my brain. It wants to be told. I would like to read Gail Entrican's poem, bad children. Everywhere the planet is pulling in her generous green, folding it up forever in the vast trunk of history. She is taking down the curtains of rain and giving them away to someone in another dimension who will treat them gently. She is rolling up the atmosphere with its cigarette holes and moth-eaten diatribes. And when she has packed her bags and slammed the door and left us looking at each other in silent shame, like bad children, we will say, we didn't do it. It was someone else. The next poet is Lord Glart. Hello. I think I have the same auto mechanic as you, Taylor. My poem is called These Stones. After the campfire, Paradise Pines, California. Follow behind a backhoe, see the burnt scarring, a desolate landscape of ash heaps, vanished lives. In a vacant lot of cinder, I remember my mother's camellia tree, how she liked Gerber Daisy's, my grandmother's tea rose. The planet binds me to this property, the stones my uncle gave to my father to stabilize the embankment. I choose to believe something still breathes here. When I call out, I hear a heartbeat. Fierce rocks pull away from the ground and I remember who I am. Stones on the hillside cover a stubborn root, a long vein, blood of my blood alive deep inside. In the passage of my remaining days, I'm here to survive myself, grow wings to fly through smoke. Let them not say by Jane Hirschfield. Let them not say we did not see it, we saw. Let them not say we did not hear it, we heard. Let them not say they did not taste it, we ate, we trembled. Let them not say it was not spoken, not written, we spoke, we witnessed with voices and hands. Let them not say they did nothing, we did not enough. Let them say as they must say something, a kerosene beauty, it burned. Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, read by its light, praised, and it burned. I'm happy to introduce James Lee Job as our next poet. I hope so. My connection's been really, really weird here for the last few minutes. I hope you've got it. The poem is untitled. The rain gutters are full and rushing, and the water spouts are gushing. Like the overflow to a dam on a very full lake, the sky is even darker to the west, yet another storm is coming. A follow-up to this one, a hard right following a left jam. This fight could go on for hours. And I'm very pleased to read a poem by the late Walter Pavlich, who we lost 18 years ago, a very fine fellow. It's called Hard Hat Pillow. I am an outline in the ash. Others sleep without moving, nailed down by weariness. Roots bum circuits beneath us. My axe won't kill any more shadows tonight. A fuse and wet fingers touch in each of us. I am too tired for water. Tomorrow we'll find two sparrows, two sparrow anatomies, that did the fire dive off the power lines, fell to start this one. They'll write the checks for next month's bills. They'll feed us. Their small decisions brought us here, the coolest place in the fire. A thunderhead passes over, scattering us in any direction. Mine, a mercury drop swimming around the palm of a hand. No, a pearl of rain slipping out of the wind tip skillet of a necessary to leave. Next up is the poet, biologist and filmmaker Maya Kosher. Thank you. Thank you so much for all your poems. I want to start with a poem by Rafael Jesus Gonzalez. Full moon in a dry summer. The full moon rises with a reddish tint from the smoke of the forest's burning. In the drought, the waters she would lift grow scarce as the salmon in the streams. Her color it would seem is that of the disquiet in our blood. My poem is rejuvenation. And a little quote from the top from Dr. Dominic de la Sala, that burn tree, it's the legacy, it's the beginning. He also said in the same interview. It's like that Monty Python line, not dead yet. Rejuvenation. Once we have looked away, once we have mourned and banished all smoldering thoughts about the tribe of blackened trees, replacing the known world for now and another season. And the last long fingers of smoke have been ushered out by wind. A ticking begins. No one has seen them arriving in such numbers, but the birds are neither lost nor passing through. They're simply linked tight to the newborn's sense of ash and rain, to the promise of white fruits, the riches concealed by bark. Those were the ways of ancestors who began their journeys as specks in the distance, some 50,000 years ago or more, riding the miles of smoky gold along a known line of hunger, growing closer and closer. An enormous beat of instinct, working a migration upstream against the flow of smoke into the source and its multiple riches. One new rival looks bright with hope. He preens his dusk and opal plumage. Others tap as if knocking on doors. Have been provided by the ages, long as genetic fibers coiled in every cell, beak and bone, muscle and shiny eye. The living are awake to the growth and profusion soon to follow. They will grow with the diligence of all known colors unfolding from the soils, chocolatey darkness, from the trees, re-greening come spring from the blackness. And I would like you to welcome, be aloe, who will follow. Thank you, Maya. Wow, that was just so moving. And thank you, Molly, and thank you, Kim, and thank everyone for being here. We're so very fortunate to have this medium to gather together during this time. My poem is titled Time Machine Fireplace. Yesterday, my 80-year-old brother emailed us a jpeg of what was left, already a cliche in this age of burning, the cremains of our home around a lone chimney. The sunlight in the photo was acid yellow, forensic bright, and the ash left an ochre tint, siphoning out the other colors like sepia prints of days gone by. Referring us to the old brick fireplace, he wrote, that was where we sang downtown. Not to orient us in the wreckage, but rather to coax us like Rod Serling into another dimension, conjuring a room where walls were paneled and colors richly coda chrome. The coral was mom's lipstick, indigo dad's Levi's, sunflower the jumpsuit of my brother's toddler, who teetered against our legs as we pressed around the player piano and readied ourselves to belt the refrain. We became salt shaker mics in hand, oh how we howled, downtown, our voices brimmed to the ceiling, where all the lights are bright, into the fireplace, up through the chimney, our hilarity sailed out into the dark. Airborne to the frogs, the foxes, the stars echoing galaxies, light years. And now it's my great pleasure to read a poem by a wonderful poet from Los Angeles, Suzanne Lummas. And it's entitled, it was 3am winter and nine miles from truckie. And nobody better than I to tell you about the stillness of snow at that hour, the silence on the surface, and the snow beneath the snow, deep, white like the black of deep space. But then in the 50s we called outer space. It exerted a pressure, aliens popped out of it, or else the gravity of earth reeled them into the frames of our TVs, turning in their silver discs. A girl in the range wood shingled lodge, who no one knew better than I had been complaining out loud, I can't sleep until her parents in the other room called out, then pretend to sleep. But even then, age 11, she felt the weight of it, the past, history of men, that long running fright show that begins at dawn, and goes on after the last station has shut down for the night, and its screen fills with crackling, battering, unresting dots, snow. What's on the other side where space ends, kids used to ask? Probably off air, snow. She did not imagine she wasn't that good. The final ravenous melt, the calving of glaciers, rivers swelling, seas rising, ice, old and obdurate as stone, giving way as if it had held all along in the nuclei of its cells like humans, the key to its own end. But she knew after the past would come the sci-fi scary future, maybe aliens. Did you think some might show up in this poem? In the Sierra Nevada off Frozen Highway 40 in that small hour? No. Though some whisper they're watching us as we grow more alien to each other and the Earth. And even back then, 3am, winter of 62, nothing on TV, the world over, only the peaceful slept, and the snow, the pure, numb and numbing stuff, which knew nothing, or knew, but didn't care. And now, it's my pleasure to introduce Mora Magnuson. Hi, thank you. This poem is called The Banishing. Once there was you, sweet pika, thick pelt and saucer ears, tiny tumble of energy, scampering over Sierra Rock, gathering grass seed, and forget me not. When the summers grew too long and cruel, you fled to higher cooler ground. And when the heat grew hotter still, you fled again, again, again, until there was no more fleeing, no more mountain to climb. Only the skies, blue grieving, holding you in its boundless gaze before your final leaving. And the poem that I'd like to read is by Serena Martin, a San Diego poet, I believe, or Southern California. Thoughts at the Carmelite Monastery. How the Carmelite nuns must have been shaken and prayed for their rose-ringed green parakeets, the day fire swept up the canyon. I miss those childhood days when nuns who never showed their faces spoke softly, giving holy cards through the turnstile. I miss the chorus of their parakeets in a hidden garden on the canyon's edge, yet at the front gate, a gardenia scent of vanilla and spice still lingers. Life follows you posing as a shepherd, and religion is based on opposites. Sin and salvation, earth and heaven, fire and ice. There was no time to open cages when fire swept up the canyon, and later, gardeners found burnt eggs. And our next poet is Connie Post. Welcome. Hi. Thank you so much, first of all, Molly, for this amazing anthology and for the San Francisco Public Library for this wonderful presentation. And it's just so good to hear all your amazing poems and all the work in this beautiful anthology. I'll start with my poem, Fireline. The fire starts like a bad conversation, spreading through wilderness, jumping from one tree to another. People watch from miles away, the smoke rising like sin from a body. Weeks later, the charred earth remains like a welt on the land. Eventually, the soil understands the language of submission, how to stay quiet when night comes. Plains will fly overhead, noticing the edges of black, how a loss is contained. As summer leaves, the fields seem to heal. The deepest green seeps to the surface like old discolored blood from a bruise. Everyone is quiet for a while. Months pass, everyone forgets, drives by the quiet hills as if they are redeemed. Then in fall, the rain begins, continues on and on like a story without chapters. How easily a mudslide happens. How easily a mind succumbs. And when they come to look for you, they will have to move the granules of earth aside with their bare and swollen hands. The next poem I'm going to read is a very beautiful poem by Laurie N. Vossler. She's from Southern California. And her poem is entitled, Sundowner Wind. Three days now on the Sundowner Stubborn, a hot hiss in the Jakarta. It's in bloom. There is no blue like this one, dusted by drought and dusk but flowering all it can. Raising its fist to the other blue up there, sun-fraught, contrailed, hazed and exhausted with light, but they're unfailingly there. The streets are empty but for a mockingbird on a roof, he too doing all he can, singing to the scorched mountains, pocked mark by the tea fire. The sundowner danced with that fire for days. Its flame still a rage in my old friend's eyes. She lost all she had to it. I think of her often bent over, sifting pottery shards from her house and ashes and finding solace there, my God, solace in so little. The sun's down, the wind dies in the trees. I thumb the two wedding bands on my finger, have them do their little dance together, tiny rings in a stillness that can't silence everything. Our next poet will be Judy Wright. Judy, you must unmute and start over. Thank you for sharing your poems. I'm so moved by all of them. October 23rd, 1978. We hung the front door the day of the fire. Our remodel almost complete. The Inferno had other plans. I grieve now, not for things lost, but for my ignorance and not knowing we all needed to mourn. With upbeat voice, belief in the possible and a huge naivete, I told my children, we're fine. The animals are fine. It was just a house. 15 years later, watching on TV, the Malibu burn yet again, I learned my folly. Tears flow down my face as I grieve for the first time our loss. Sometimes sorrow is a long time in coming. Another lesson learned. Flowers in our lives ignite the realization that things of value exist inside, immune to flames wrath. The first wildflowers gracing the road sides and the return of the doe on the hill filled our hearts with a moment's pleasure, proof that nature endures as we endure, bearing the weight of a thousand losses. We get better still. This is a poem by Claudia Montier, entitled Ponderosa. The pines, green triangles of light. The pines gathered at Meadows Edge, where rumors of drought have scorched the grasses. The purpose of this curve, this particular light, is to pray to unexpected layers and dusty sediments. Too long have the bones been stacked. Longer than the birth of the first galaxy, there is that much grief. The shawl unravels, she knits and knits, and still the threads are naked, burned, boiled in the grief pot, drenched in the surveillance of stars. Our next poet is Michael, write down. Thank you. Thank you very much. My poem is called Smoldering. Even three years on any poem about the fires still smells of smoke. Some words glow with embers that haven't yet died. Memory has its own desires. Turns out everything burns, valleys and houses, cars close. Kate had just tied my tie when the text came. No school. I went anyway and checked in with the principal when he got the call, the word, the name of the student I knew well, the girl we'd later lose in the hospital. Palms are like magic baskets. You can shove into them more than you'd think they could hold. Her name, Cressa. The wall of smoke I saw over Redwood Valley. The friend who said she saw asphalt flow like black lava and so much more. The poem still smolders. It breathes the oxygen we use to blow on those last coals. Remembering again and again. I feel very fortunate to be able to read a poem by Devereux Baker. She's also I'm up here in inland Mendocino and she's on the coast. Just about the most elegant radio find on the coast of Mendocino, I assure you. This is called after the fires. We were afraid to go back. Afraid to listen to the stories. Ash and bone might tell. We wanted to believe our lives were immutable, untouchable by nature, fate or disaster. At twilight, we skirted the base of the first burned hill, reclaimed her scorched shoulder, her ruined slope. The ground beneath her feet released puffs of smoke like ancient ghosts. They rose up around us to disappear into wind. We thought of Spirit Lake in the mountains near Shasta, how some believe out of nothing a spirit may be reborn into the physical shape of a tree, a bush, a rock or stream. Is this what your grandmother felt the morning she called for the healer to bring the spirit back into the shape of you? How the healer came into your grandmother's kitchen where you lay and began to sing a song to reclaim your place among the living. There was so much loss you had to travel through. She told your grandmother to make a circle of salt to open all the windows. Is this what I have learned from you? How the soul of a thing cannot be destroyed by fire but remains buried beneath ash, bound in a circle of salt waiting to return to its physical presence. You returned through a dark land with no signposts, only spirit songs and the rattle of sacred bones to guide you. You came into all four directions at once and startled your aunts who placed their hands in a blessing on you. We stand at the base of the burned hill. We stand at the base of the burned hill and taste and the left behind spirit of lightning, the soft core of ash, the outline of smoke that haunts this body of earth. At the edge of the road one tree persists like the spirit of a child moving through a land of loss into the body of a boy again, dreaming a new shape into all four directions at once. Returning to the land of his birth. And I'm pleased to introduce this Lisa Rosenberg. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Kim and San Francisco Library for hosting Molly for curating and inviting us and all of you for your work. And for listening. I'll start with my poem, which is fire sky. First sweet smoke. Grass heads and dead wood. The undergrowth undone in one swath of heat. How faultless. The motes. The dull lens of dusk all day. Mantle of ash. Umber streams. Untold. Inscrutable. Beginnings. And now I'm very pleased to read a poem by Linda Dove. Who I don't know, but I grew up in the fire prone foothills of greater Los Angeles, which is where Linda lives. And this poem is called math of the lost world. One day that color blue on the swallowtail wing disappears. It had looked like metal and powder at the same time, the color of a gun that might bloom. Another day it's a frog or spider or it's the spider inside the frog. So hidden. We can't see what we've done. When the final male white rhino goes. The caretaker is holding its ear in his hand as if he is holding a coin. Something he doesn't want to lose. Is the ear the last piece of the body to go? Does he mean to help it along or hold it back? In other words, what is the price of our attention? We have loved every pine tree to a brown torch. Choked the oceans with straws drawn from our lips. Packed the screen with our prints. Body counts. We say we prefer that the losses not add up. Rockless wad of paper here. Zygote there. Disaster is a multiplier like flies or rubber tires. Let us see the bee collapse on the concrete. The polar bear goes slack like a sail. The fire reduce the parents to a green flame. Let the loss seem intimate. Or else the harm is as far away as hands cut from limbs. Just like that. We will be left with paper tigers and a whale of a story. And now it's my great pleasure to introduce Kim Shuck. Well, thank you everybody for being here. It's my pleasure to do these and invite folks. I'm going to start out reading Denise Lowe's wildfire spread. Branching power lines, sparkles, detour, transfer stations, electrify, backfeed to light, Santa Rosa. Shut off the geysers in the hills along Dry Creek Valley. Here dendritic chortle of generator. Arab gullies, spider slopes, junipers, splayed leaves repeat, ready to burst flammable pitch. Red helicopters loop overhead pouring water on grass tinder, smoke, billows, dust devil blade. Now I'm going to read mine, always fire season. Flame reads the stories of tree rings out loud and for the last time. Thursday our kitchen fire alarms went off, breathing lives as we were, breathing the collected things of lies. The fur and claws, the feathers, the ID cards and photographs and pocket lint. Here in the bay our sun rises and sun sets has changed. We know the forest by when they burn, whose ashes on our windshield, whose ashes in our skin, our lungs. The cars, immobile, fused to the melted roadway, less rain, cracked lips of hillside, flaking skin of flood plain, and the dice roll of petticoat. Conditionally captured in wire, running the dry west, curled and silvered fingers of pine as monuments. And it is my great pleasure to introduce Jillian Wagoner. Thanks, Kim. And thanks, Molly, for putting this reading together. And thanks to the San Francisco Public Library. This poem is called After. Even the black metal shelves, our father lugged from garage to garage all those years. Even those gave way in that fury, sagged and buckled, folded in on themselves. The items stored there unrecognizable. Little mounds of ash. Little curls of what was and now isn't. A friend says the biggest difference is the light. How much there is now that the tree canopy is gone. Blackened trunks so gaunt. They barely cast shadows. Somehow my brother's lot is cleared early on. The crumpled garage doors gone. The melted washer gone. The skeleton of gazebo scraped away with the ash that was the kitchen table where he left a cup of coffee half full that morning. Gone. Somehow our parents old house survives unscathed. A fluke. Next door. A man shirtless. Pokes through the ashes of his house with what was once a ski. Happy garden Chinese is gone. The pizza place is gone. Safeway is gone. 11 churches gone. Ace hardware gone. That little diner dad loved. Gone. My friend recites the names of streets where people died. Don't go there. She says you don't want to go there. At Sam's liquors the roof caved in and bottles melted on their shelves. Mound of blue. Mound of green. Mound of diamond bright white. All reflecting back daylight. Stained glass. Almost sacred. I'm very happy to read a poem by my good friend Stella Baratlas. Her poem is called root cause failure analysis. Define influx. An arrival of or entry of large numbers of people. Or an inflow of water into a river. Lake or the sea. I'm trying to tell you all the ways a thing can go wrong. How great blue herons are landing on mats of soil. And plants right now in Sacramento slew. No matter how many temporary emergency influx shelters are built to house the human overflow. To manage the effects of human devastation syndrome. I'm trying to tell you my love. We are truly berms. Created by years of peep moss. Accumulation. Dense tangle of delta weeds. Our hearts a weathered lay down in the slews. Open. Open to children. And yet can it get more catastrophic? The influx inevitable. And even approaching the task from a multidisciplinary perspective. The spaces where physics. Soil. Scar. Fluids and distortions intersect. Losses breaking our hearts. Rising seas and powerful currents. Tear the roots. Wash the soil. Oh, everyone. I'm trying to do this thing. Not limit my understanding to the engineering environment. Instead. The root cause may exist right here. The root cause may exist right here. Where we refuse to allow a great blue heron to walk. Into our thicket of nerves. And change us. And I'm very happy and honored to hand the. Perverbial Mike. Back to our very own. Most wonderful. Molly Fisk. Thank you so much, Gillian. Thank you so much, everybody. This is an amazing situation. I am so happy that you. Set me your poems that we made a book out of them. That the book is around for people to read and for us to read from. I'm going to be trying to do as many. Through the next year. And get every single contributor, including those kids who are working with us. So stay tuned for that in the ether. And thank you again, Kim. And thank you again, John. And the San Francisco public library for. Having us in our own houses at your. Screen. It's always a little bit like Hollywood squares. I'm not sure how old we are. But it's a very funny thing to see all of our faces. What I love is to see, of course, all the backgrounds and everybody's. My kitchen. Dishes. Everyone. So they can give a big. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Wonderful. A lot of pleasure. Thank you. And it was awesome to meet you and we had a great time. Thank you. Thank you. And this. Everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Molly.