 Hello and welcome everyone, thank you for coming to this month's Poem Jam. I'm John Smalley, a librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Department in the Main Library. While we're waiting for a few more people to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community. On behalf of the Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatish Ohlone, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatish have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside on their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pair our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatish community and by acknowledging their sovereign rights as First Peoples. Thanks again for coming to this poetry reading, which is part of an ongoing series, the second Thursday of each month, and it will continue next year. If you're interested in our poetry and other programs, there are flyers on the table, as well as newsletter. Feel free to help yourselves to those, as well as do coffee and cookies. So now I want to introduce the host of the series, our beloved Kim Shuck. Please give a warm welcome to Kim. Everyone should probably have a job where somebody introduces them as being beloved, and then you get applauded. It's kind of fun. This is a particular enjoyment for me tonight's show, because Sarah Beale and I have known each other almost 20 years, and we have worked on a number of different points of activism in unison, and we have read together a lot from poems about Barbie dolls to poems that ended up buying the Ninth Ward in New Orleans materials for their clinic after the levee breaks. So we've done a bunch of things together, and I'm really delighted with the new series of books that she has been working with other people on. So on this very cold night where we're all sort of huddled in here stress-eating Neapolitan Oreos and hanging out in the poem dungeon here in the San Francisco Main Library, I just really am delighted to introduce you to a good friend of mine, who is also a really amazing poet, Sarah Beale. Thank you so much, Kim. Thank you everybody for coming. I'm so excited to see all of you, and I'm so excited to talk about the work that Colossus Press, we've all been doing together. We started with Just Colossus, which is a short chapbook that we put together that helped fund Freedom for Immigrants when the former presidential administration was separating families at the border, and that really struck a chord with the poetry community in the Bay Area, and now here we are working on editing our fourth book. So welcome. We do have Books for Sale, both Colossus Home and Colossus Freedom, and I hope people are interested in buying them, and I'm really excited to be here in this room hearing all this amazing poetry from our books and also just from our amazing poets. So I thought I would start with reading my poem from Colossus Home, and then I'll read one other one. So, umbilical home. First there was an ember, a splintered spark, moment of catch, germination. Each history roots in unique terrain, unfurls from an umbilical home. We creatures are tender fruit, always vigilant. We listen for the peripheral call, God-recognition along this distant music, humming us back our crooked rambles, anthems, jingles, laments. Songs pulse the crackle of evening fires, surge a laughing cacophony of wing-filled flocks, croon the caress of newborn grass, tease with jump rope rhymes, smack and giggle sun-warm schoolyards. Some of us were sung in deep shade. Our songs whisper a memory of absence, perpetual cannons chronicle the weight of empty arms. Our symphonies rage, eruptions of fear, violence, marbles, fragile hearts. Our tunes are toxic, flickers of blue flame, poison rises in feathered rivulets, catches the ankle of every escape. Each song is a singular vessel, tenacious, not immutable. We could compose new hymns and sing them brash from porches, balconies and fire escapes. Let's sing for a constant, an endless offering, a place of return, of rhythmic possibilities, licked wounds, sing the smell of oranges, a kiss to the nape of a worry-wound neck, a refuge for dreams and remade plans, a refrain whole enough to hold all the tears, laughter, fights and midnight snacks we gather as we rock ourselves to sleep. Thank you. All of the money that we get from Colossus Home goes to support Moms for Housing, which is, as you may have heard, a local Bay Area nonprofit that was started by unhoused moms in Oakland who took control of an unoccupied building, which there are many, many, many of in both San Francisco and Oakland, many more unoccupied buildings than there are unhoused people. And that is 100% true tonight, right here in the rain in San Francisco. So we may need to rethink how we handle unoccupied buildings. And then all the money from Colossus Freedom goes to support California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Thanks, Kim. I'm going to read like the kids do from my phone. Okay, so this is a really new poem, but it was the one that was on my phone. And it is called Phase Change. After silence has curled to settle deep in dust-filled corners, after the front door remains closed, its weighty latch clicked flat and final. After your tea has gone cold, amber leaves float fertile with memory. After their names live on your lips, eager as bright morning prayers. After, explore your old places, the ones that pinch and the ones that rejoice. After, the mind unwinds, it rolls the same old stones between its dry palms. After all, we face the same moon, the same flawless unknown. Now, a tributary, a different type of spring, spreads fingers, unfolds flesh. Now, you see the workings of the wind, the cliffs it makes of grainy sand. Now, night after night, your thoughts grow thin, serious broken by rumpled dreams. Now, you're patient with weaving, with trying over, with cracks and mistakes. Now, on the way, there are rocks you hold, small lines that crimp around your heart. Now, with the light's gradual shift, you notice the glow because of the dark. Now and then, watch the sunrise bloom, reach for its offered palm. Thank you. Kellyanne Parker. You're next, so I'm going to give you a minute and say this. Sarah did great, didn't she? Can we have a really big applause for Sarah? Sarah didn't know she was reading tonight. She thought she was just introducing people, but I lure her to this stage so infrequently it's really important to get her to say things into the microphone when she's here. Kellyanne Parker is a queer Latinx poet from the Bay Area. She's been co-hosting My Word Open Mic for several years now and is a regular Bay Area feature. She has seen how her community has been set up by the engineered genocide of addiction built by the US to oppress communities of color. It's generational trauma by design that continues to lead the cycle of violence, addiction, and ultimately incarceration of friends and family. Her upcoming book, Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind, is due to be released by Nomadic Press in February 2022. Now that I'm reading that, that book exists because I have a copy on my desk. So please welcome Kellyanne Parker, the mic in the middle. Thank you, sweetie. Hello everyone. Oh wow, it's really wonderful to be here. Hugs. And I'm going to read a poem from Colossus Home that I was a part of that is actually in my book. And that talks about genocide. I'm going to start by reading my essay that is in Colossus Freedom. And what I would say is follow the Colossus series because it's doing really incredible work. And I know that some of the things I'm most proudest of is in Colossus. So thank you so much. And for those who don't know me, I talk a lot about mental illness and addiction. And of course, all these things tie into generational trauma. And so I'm going to read my essay called Genocide by Addiction. And this is an account of my family. My mother was born in East LA where my grandmother grew up. After the end of World War II, they were among the other colonized mind families who bought homes in the San Fernando Valley on the GI Bill. They settled into Panorama City, which would become largely Latinx. There they bought into the American dream, everyone working to get ahead. But my grandfather came back from a war, a casualty of it. He would die an angry alcoholic of pancreatic cancer at 42. This pattern would repeat itself many times over. My family that stayed in East LA would face even more loss. Once when I worked on my genealogy, I found out that the war hero story about my grandfather was a lie. When I looked up his military records, he'd been in a military prison for two of the four years that he served. It matched with my grandmother's story of he and a friend waking up inside of a candy counter in some other country and being demoted back to private. Somehow he managed to get honorably discharged. Along with diabetes, liver and pancreatic cancer would take so many in my family. As each generation slowly denied its identity, it would make space for something awful and hungry to consume what was left. Still, we made room for traditions and every Sunday was an all-day event at my grandmother's. Many happy memories there. Soon another war would come and ask for poor and people of color to be on the front lines. I had five uncles that went to Vietnam. None came back whole. One on the very front line went AWOL every so often, hid in the jungle until he couldn't. He would come back by a motorcycle and disappear for many years. Another came back suicidal and would slowly die of the effects of Agent Orange. Others came back addicted to heroin, a gift from Uncle Sam. One would find himself in jail for selling heroin he needed to make money to keep using heroin. So while the U.S. was the original drug dealer, this small pawn trying to make it to the next day would find himself in jail. Having 12 siblings makes for a lot of letters to the judge, but still he went to jail. This story could be told by so many. That poverty, poor health, and drug addiction are engineered by design by this so-called great country. The differences became clearer to me as I got older. Growing up in Granada Hills, I was removed from the constant drive-bys that my friends who lived by dealt with. Like my friend who grew up in the tinder keg that was Lake Butaris. Her brother was the casualty of domestic violence who would be murdered in his jail cell. And then there's my good friend in school. She was a great student and a kind person. We ate lunch every day together in junior high and often in high school. We couldn't go to each other's house after school because she was bussed into the school. I remember the time she told me in the eighth grade that her boyfriend had died while cleaning his gun. All I could do was say I was sorry. I listened to what she told me and was careful not to ask too many questions. I think about her from time to time and I wonder if the system made her too. This next piece is in my book Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind and it's in Colossus Home. It's called Morning Mission Musings. Today I wandered the Mission District in San Francisco. I watched as construction people furiously polish it to a shine. It made me reflect on where the people go. The ones who are never new and shiny, where do they go now? Those gritty city folk who were born with old souls and world weary eyes. The ones whose faces are freckled with car exhaust. For while I love things new and shiny, I have a deep appreciation for places that have had their shiny worn down and threadbare. Worn down to a realness and sheer enough to see through a gesture rolled out of bed self. Those are the places for all people. For people unwelcome in shinier places. People who are different. Whose islands of refuge are constantly shrinking and shifting. As I walk today I think about what I love about the Mission. The mission I remember is a place of welcome to people familiar with being unwelcome. I think about the impoverished immigrants or even refugees from a more domestic yet hostile way of life. Trying to eke out some small space of comfort. I think about the homeless and how they're unwelcome not only in neighborhoods but sidewalks and parks and underpasses. Where next? As I walk down the Mission and then Valencia, I feel compelled to capture its essence before it's gone. There seems to be a pattern between alternating old with new. I linger at the older established businesses and look at the bumpy lacquer of tape melded to the window. Competing with the cloudy patina of hand prints. These are the hand prints of real people who once belonged to there. And I wonder where will all these people go? Thank you Kellyanne. It's good to have you back here. Now the thing about shutdowns and reading people's work and not seeing them read is that I have now asked for the pronunciation of this first name three times and I still don't have it in my head so I'm going to give it a whack. Elisa Salison is a poet and educator in Berkeley, California. She's had essays, op-eds, photography and poetry published in AMP, Always Electric, SF Public Library, Poem of the Day, Sparkle and Blank, Counterpunch in the Bay Area, Writing Projects, Digital Paper. Her first chapbook will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2023. Please come to my stage. I've taken to using a music stand when I read. It makes me less nervous. So does saying that I'm nervous make me less nervous, so. All right. I'm going to start with my piece from Colossus Freedom. It's a piece about my mother. In 1958 my mother, Susan Salison, was one of a string of young women who were brutally attacked on the streets of Portland, Oregon. She was 16 years old. Susan went on to dedicate her life to issues of women, trauma and PTSD as one of the grassroots organizers and founders of the trauma-informed care movement. In fact, I've been told that when you hear the term trauma-informed care, it's because of my mom. I didn't believe it for a long time, but then all of her friends and colleagues were like, no, no, that's true. It was her commitment and determination that kept trauma on the public mental health agenda. And a strong focus of her work throughout her life was building systems of healing and transformation for incarcerated women, their families and communities. This piece that I'm going to read is taken, some of the language is taken from newspaper reports at the time of these incidents in Portland. My mother used to say she died once. My mother used to say she died once. My mother died before she was my mother. She died once in the gutter on Southwest Green Avenue, portaged across the overflowing silence. My mother died before the next three sluggings, before the boy with the blunt instrument hit three more girls, portaled bodies clubbed and silence multiplied. His only confession was, I don't know why. The boy's blunt instrument hit again and again and again, my mother's first death, a light motif. He confessed, but the boy didn't know why. Her first death, a point of no return. My mother's first death, a survival, an echo through trembling connection. Her first death returns and returns layered into the DNA looped through me, echoed through you, reverberations ripple woman to woman awake, layered into our voices looped through every contraction, each new moonrise. Woman to woman to woman, an invocation from marrow and belly we roar into every contraction into each full moon. Our chant, we do know why. From marrow and belly we keen into our ever-dying selves. Our kindled fire, this chant, a flame with knowing. My mother used to say she died once. One more about my mom, owed to my mother's gold nail polish. My mother's ten fingers metallic hue shines halo onto lipstick smeared teeth that frame her boozy laugh, her hippie dress, her breast spilling out when she raises an arm to pull another wine jug from the grocery store shelves and teenage me hiding in the next aisle embarrassed by those golden nails and wayward boobs. I wanted nothing to do with her careening and crashing histories. My mother now paints my daughter's nails golden, wild delight and bling five-year-old hands glint in sunlight, flashing spirit to the world, tiny fingers invincible with priceless shine. My girl is glittery glam, her grandmother's golden gift, ten fingers of metallic wonder. She paints the sky with dazzling daggers and magical rays that shoot from newly adorned digits her power now complete. She is precious metal, she is a riferous joy. With a floor as my girl displays her glitzy glory to the neighbor lady, the one with artfully frosted hair, matched Kazmir's sweater set, the one who sips chardonnay but never too much, the one who is everything my mother is not. I hear that perfectly muted woman ask my 24-carat girl, does your grandmother really wear gold nail polish? My arm-shimmered child deflates ever so slightly she pulls her hands away. In the weight of my daughter's silence, I open my own hands. I spread my fingers wide, their naked nails close-cropped and ragged. Their accumulated dirt ridges, cracks, their imperfection, their promise of alchemy. It's all the same to the ocean. I am pressed flat between hearts of others and so I escape to the sea, standing high above roiling surf where the waves lure beckons. For a moment I sway on cliff edge ready to give myself to waves that do not ask and do not judge. The waves do not know of lists that keep me awake at night and they do not have to count my mother's pills tomorrow morning. The waves do not speak strained teen silence on the car ride home. They are indifferent to depression from below and dementia beyond. And the waves know nothing of my denial that the space in between can no longer bear the weight of his touch. The waves never have to search for the right words to say goodbye either too soon or way too late. My obligations, my aspirations, my turbulent desires are meaningless. The waves don't give a fuck. The waves will sweep me away as I cast my body into their beckoning arms. It's all the same to the ocean. I am a rotting sea lion carcass. I am giant bladder kelp untethered. I am no different from driftwood, tossed and floating wild, worn smooth, porous. And I have one more poem. This last one is from my chat book that will be released on Finishing Line Press in February. I brought some cards and put them over on the table there if you're interested. And many of the poems in this chat book are about my experience with my uncle. And in his last weeks of life, Sal Salison was a poet himself. And this is the Albaad for Sal. Oh, Shenandoah, I'm bound to leave you. Naked on his back with legs and arms grasping grasping air grasping wild fear and flailing anger grasping for his exploded desire. I climb into Sal's bed and sing to him. I hold him as he lunges for the window a last hope for escape on this his last morning on earth. I should let him jump through that portal down into a stranger's backyard. I'll follow and we'll scale the fence cross the street to Berkeley Bowl grocery where we'll buy his favorite double chocolate chip ice cream and sit together on the curbs, trading spoon back and forth, sweetness slowly melting on our tongues. He will lick the container clean, kiss me goodbye and saunter whistling into the Albaad of his after. And I into my renewed materiality. But I hold him back from that window. I seal his final hours. I sing him away rolling river. I'm bound away as he invokes Shakespeare and whispers Rilke and Ray Carver. I initiate the farewell kiss as he softens and slows closes eyes and opens hands wide dropping seeds of morning into my waiting arms. I press the seeds between these words for safekeeping as Sal flies out that window pulling pulled upward away rolling river away by beloved oracles of language. And I watch him fade toward distant words. How can all this weightlessness survive? Thank you. One of those people who can misplace my glasses on my body. Suzanne Dykeman is the author of two full length collections of poetry. These are dark ordinary furniture press books and equilibrium's form. Sharesman books as well as the chapbooks counterweight, transitioning indigo source hearing loss and in collaboration with Elizabeth Robinson, Vivian Mar 11 photographs and 20 poems. Her work has appeared in a number of journals most frequent recently fence parentheses and Colorado review. She lives in rights in Albany, California. Thank you, Sarah. Thanks to the public library for having this reading. I'm very grateful to have been involved with two of the anthologies home and freedom and I care deeply about the work that these Sarah and others have done putting these books together. I'll start by reading from freedom. And this is a piece inspired by what happened at the border with babies and their families being separated and the babies being caged. It's called taken one. When one child is taken. When all the children are taken away. When you must have the child. When the child's belly is empty. When your belly empties of child. When the trees continue to grow. So many shades of green. When morning birds sing their songs. I know none of them. When childhood left when the heart is split. I want the hammer. I am the hammer that breaks as the earth opens a crack to gathered steam. Untenable pocket of heat as water rolls over the body it leaves salt on skin. As I write today's date as I wrote the date when the child was taken. It is molten to the hammer is small. I swing my arm aim beyond my hand. I keep swinging when the children are taken. When the hammer sings songs of birds. Childhood broken. When childhoods are ripped away. When blood is disturbed in the fissure. The fissure seeps. The hammer hits my nail the bruise not memory. When the hammer strikes rock it hopes. When the children are returned. When the child will never come back. When the fissure will not close. As I walk around it. As we talk around it. The egg that has split. The baby that is made. The child we hold. The dimpled hand. Next I'll read my pieces that two pieces that were in Colossus home. And though I have not been homeless. My mother experienced it. And that gets passed down within the family. Something that one continues to feel. So it's an important subject home. With little room for. With little to be held under a single roof. Shared but separated barely by walls. Run down as rain runs down to stain. Then hold. Being a village where one rests or lies. With many under one. As in the Irish from deer. Something near cherished. But how to cherish such source. Which is also the same as and. Our long and final purpose. From what one needs. Dear dream. You have me disputing the end of the road. Which highway terminates where. I am confusing myself. Isn't there a crossing of the two. No matter that truth I have landed here. Mossy memory. Not originally from me but given to my body. Always damp with the question. Where will we live. I was raised to ask that carving it as a theme. With one who was lost the one dead. Eviction as where to live now. You dream land in a junction close to a bay and sand. Near a river that makes its languid way through the edges of town. I call out home. And finally I will read a piece that's. More like prose than poetry. But you can decide that it's called. Punching the body. Uncertain of the state of my lungs. Breathe in and breathe out. The emotions associated with the lungs in Chinese medicine. Our sadness or grief. Uncertain of the state of my skeleton. Spine moves forward and spine moves back. Traditional Chinese medicine states that the kidneys are in charge of the bones. Essentially the skeletons growth and repair are related to the kidneys. And the kidney is related to fear. Emotions. Weak willpower insecure aloof and isolated. Let me draw this out. The news has not been good. Yet remember how not long ago you stood on a levy and watched the motorboat slow as they passed the dock. And recall how the road built across that levy was too narrow for more than one car. But had a broken yellow line painted down the middle of the pothole asphalt anyway. And that the field stretched to the horizon. And as you walked the high ground you saw chicory and cowsbane and wild California rose. And a tangle of blackberries with flowers but no fruit yet. And remember the orchards. Those were acres of pear trees have been pulled out. Trunks and limbs left to dry in the sun and wind. And how it felt looking at it like a slaughter of innocence. The orchards bounty. That I won't draw out. But the levees were peaceful bordering the waters that drifted across the land as they made their way westward to the ocean. Unseen from where one stood. But knowing that was where they were going. Moving like fingers to all connect eventually to the one palm of the hand. And how we had to discuss how to say slew even though we are native English speakers. But ones who read more words than we can speak. Is it pronounced like slew? Or is a rhyme to thou? Or should we forget it altogether and substitute the word tributary? Simply because we find some words difficult to say. Thank you very much. Rebecca Lee Whiting is a lawyer and a queer writer of color based in San Francisco. Rebecca's poetry has previously appeared in Colossus Freedom, Feminine Collective, and Prometheus Dreaming. An MFA candidate in poetry at Bennington College, Rebecca also serves on the board of editors of Colossus Press. Welcome. Thank you so much, Kim, and thank you, Sarah, for hosting this. I'm really excited to read a piece for you all that is in Colossus Freedom. I wrote this, it's called Chento for Roe, after the oral argument in the Dobbs decision last year, which later became the decision overturning Roe. And I chose the Chento, which is a sort of patchwork poem, for those of you who are not familiar, based on sources that include both poems and then also Supreme Court decisions. So drawing on my legal practice. So this is Chento for Roe. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Choices concerning contraception, family relationships, procreation, and child-rearing. Every single one of these laws is called a dequestion. My responsibility is to tell you the truth. They used to say, the right to personal choice is implicit in the concept of order liberty, fundamental to our very existence and survival. I was newly naked, aware of myself as a separate self, distinct from dirt and bone. They used to say, our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds, women's bodies. Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation. They used to say that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Most of the time, my mind gnaws on such ridiculous fictions. We are born with dreams in our hearts, so free we seem, so fettered fast we are. When we learned how to behave in America, they put me in the closet because they liked me still. There's never been equality for me nor freedom in this homeland of the free. Each month it got a little less civil, terrible weights of stone, relentless. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, I imagine the body giving itself up for another system. What will they say? That the paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. That life in a box is better than no life at all, barely daring to breathe or a chew. Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late? You are wasting time and we have so little. Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? When it's over, I don't want to wonder, how will we survive? You foolish men, don't you know? For the eyeing of my scars there is a charge. You may write me down in history, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. I am treacherous with old magic. A woman like that is not ashamed to die, and it will never end until it all ends. Open this when you need me most. When I rise up above the earth, beyond this passage of the gate of death, I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor, bright as the blood-red edge of the moon. When it's over, I want to say, oh my enemy, this is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. And then I have another poem for you, which I think is also apropos on the subject of freedom. It's called American Dreams. In my dream, I am a conscript sitting on my pack with my band of brothers in arms and a clearing at the edge of a lush hillside forest, at the end of a day of mindless walking, tending to my imagined soldiery tasks, changing my socks, cleaning my gun, the sky above us, a wash of pastel rainbow sherbet melting into lazuli. The way dream sunsets are somehow more perfect even than a technicolor showstopper prismed into being by flecks of carbon on a winter day. Cold gun in my warm farm boy hands, I marvel at the piercing beauty of this place I never should have seen, terraced fields of rice carved from cragged limestone mountains, riffling brown river below. And just when I begin to forget why I am where I am, the hillside royals erupts in vermilion clouds of fire billowing to black. The trees burn like paper, the earth around us is cut to ribbons of dirt by shrieking steel, and it's all too loud, it's all too close, and there is no more sky, my friends are all running, and I am running too, clutching my useless gun in the wet darkness, leaves slapping my face, vines cutting my arms, and then I am alone. The sharp sounds of the jungle and my own ragged breath and then silence. I know it's just a recurring dream and not a memory from a former life, even though it's always the same, same pink sky, same wide calloused hands, because it doesn't make any sense. We were the ones with napalm. And anyway, the Tibetan Book of the Dead says that you pass through the womb door into the next life in an instant. And I was born in 1985, not 1968, and I don't think I was lucky enough to be someone's coddled house cat in between. So I know I could not have been this reluctant teenager sent halfway around the world to kill people who look like me, granddaughter of a paper son. Our family tree, a paper trail of fictive sons and real nephews reaching all the way back to Guangdong and our own rice patties. Paper, not blood, because we had the wrong blood for America, but still we managed to be in the right place at the right time. In San Francisco in 1906, when that famous fire burned the public records, and my great-great-granduncle made himself a 14th Amendment citizen, born here, he said, not in China, where, nevertheless, he said, he had two sons and four grandsons among them, my grandfather. Shipped to California by way of Angel Island at 10 years old with our family's dreams printed on a scrap of paper, fleeing the communists who made his real grandfather kneel on broken glass. Not the same communists my dream self meant to kill, but also the same. To live with a father he'd never met, an uncle grandfather who hated them both. Two years younger than his paper said, my gung-gung graduated at 16 and enlisted in that other so-called good war, though he was too late to be sent to kill the Japanese woman my teenage grandmother was mistaken for and spat on before she began wearing a button that told white people she was your friend, she was Chinese. So I tell myself it's just a dream when I wake with ash from someone else's life in my mouth again, that the only part that's real is that it isn't easy for any of us to love a country that doesn't always love us back. Thank you so much. My somewhat inappropriate compliment for that writing is that you do not write like somebody who's doing an MFA in poetry. And that is a compliment. Donald X. Fakarino was born in 1969 after years of not existing. He's a world-famous board game designer having made Dominion, among others. His previous writing credits include the funny paragraphs on all of the Dominion expansion boxes and in this neighborhood after the war in Colossus' home. Don't bet against yourself. Yeah? I know what you meant. You know what I meant. Oh, okay. So I have this thing from put mouth in correct spot. I have this thing from freedom to read. But I wanted to tell this personal anecdote first because I realized that it was on theme and that seemed amazing because, I don't know, I worried about that. Now tonight, no one was on theme. Like, but the last time it was all relentless prison. And I mean, not that no one was on theme tonight. So I better just get to this anecdote. So it's one of those, for me, it's a six degree of separation thing because it's like, you know, what do I know about prisons? And, you know, well, I'm 53 probably. I know something. I've known somebody who had some. And it turns out I did. So in the 90s, and we're all friends here. I'm just going to tell this story. In the 90s, I was a computer programmer at Fresenius, a East Bay company programming dialysis machines. And there was this guy who worked there named Scott. And he was a tech or something. He wasn't an engineer, but he helped out engineering in some fashion. Sometimes they interacted with him over that. And sometimes he would come by my office and we'd split a bag of microwave popcorn and talk about our lives, the movies or whatever. He had a 17 year old kid, and this was the early 90s. And the state of internet pornography was not what it is today. It was like ASCII. And so his kid rang up huge phone bills calling 900 numbers. And Scott would be like, oh, my kid calling these 900 numbers. You know, I try to tell him, go down to a bar, you can get the real thing for cheaper. And there was one time I had a, you know, I know almost nothing about Scott really, right? It was just these conversations. There was one time when I had a kidney stone at work, my first kidney stone, and I lay on the floor of my office in agony. And the other programmer sheepishly went to our boss Wayne to say, maybe he's just kidding or maybe something's wrong. And quickly I was surrounded by nurses because it was a dialysis machine company. And they immediately thought it's a kidney stone. And Scott offered to drive me to the hospital, which was five minutes away. But the manager showed up and he said, no, we have to wait for an ambulance, curse his black heart. And, you know, those are the things I remember about Scott. So one day I noticed Scott hadn't showed up at work in a while. And I went and asked Wayne, what's the deal? It's got on the long vacation or what? And Wayne said, well, Scott's not coming back. And I can't tell you why. It's like super mysterious, right? What in the world? And I said, is he dead? And Wayne said, no, he's not dead, but he's not coming back. And I just can't tell you. So that was just a mystery for two or three days. And then Wayne called me to his office and said, OK, now he's dead. And so there was a, he had a roommate who was a co-worker. And so I was able to get the story of what had happened here. So Scott had, some night had gotten drunk and yelled at his kid about the 900 numbers. And his kid had been scared and called the cops and the cops showed up. And the kid said, no, just kidding. And the cops went away. But it happened again sometime later, some other night. You know, got drunk, yelled at his kid. Kid called the cops, the cops showed up. Kid said, just kidding. And the cop said, well, it's the second time we have to take him in. And so they took him in and they put him in jail where he waited for whatever it is you're waiting for, when no one has exactly accused you of anything and there's no evidence you really did anything wrong. But the police think maybe you're not a good parent. And so the initial report was that he had died of a brain aneurysm. And I thought, wow, you know, that's life. One day everything's fine. The next, you're in jail, dying of a brain aneurysm. But it turns out that brain aneurysm is just something you can write on the form that looks a lot prettier than what actually happened. And this wasn't exactly covered up and came out that in fact he'd been beaten to death. And somebody eventually found there was a newspaper story about it and someone showed it to me. And, you know, buried in this East Bay newspaper, there was a little article that said, you know, inmate in whatever East Bay prison dies after altercation with other inmate. A few more details about the other inmate. And note that this was being looked into. Nothing to worry about. And, you know, if you'd stumbled on this article at the time, you just would have thought, well, one bad man in prison killed another. I guess that's how it goes. So that's my personal anecdote that was totally on theme. Now I'm going to read this story. So this story will be much weirder and lighter. Is it light? It's not light at all. But I wrote a series of 20 stories, one for each song title on the guided by voice's album, B1000, and it ended up kind of having an overarching theme of people trapped being themselves. And this is this one, track six, mothered in hugs. Our hero has been imprisoned, trapped by his arch nemesis, the nefarious Dr. Brain. He awakens in a small prison cell deep within Dr. Brain's lair. The prison cell is not the only barrier to our hero's freedom. The cell is surrounded by a series of ever larger walls of Dr. Brain's design, by itself a potent obstacle designed to trap our hero here forever. But our hero is not to be beaten by the mere idea of prison. He immediately sets to work on his escape plan. He is our hero for good reason. He is mighty and clever and resourceful. He will take an ingenious prison to hold him. The first obstacle is the physical obstacle of the prison cell's walls. These are no match for our hero. He tears great chunks out of them with his bare hands and is soon through. But Dr. Brain is devious and is not only physical obstacles that our hero will face. The cell is surrounded by the second obstacle, an oozing wall of reality. The stuff is finely detailed, nitty gritty, cold harsh and everywhere. Its tangibility is undeniable and no mortal could hope to pass through it and survive. But our hero is not stopped so easily. He is imaginary and so reality is no obstacle to him. He slides through the wall with ease. Beyond it is the third obstacle, a jagged wall of statistics. Numbers piled on numbers in arbitrary relationships. Primes, fractions and repeating decimals approaching infinity. Even the sanest mathematician would be baffled by this wall, could not hope to thunder it. But our hero does not even pause. Like always he defies the odds and thus easily breaks through. The fourth obstacle is a vague wall of ethics. It is a gray area, an obscure jumble of causes and effects, justifications and white lies. It is unclear if breaking through this wall would be good or evil. The ramifications are impossible to work out. But our hero doesn't care. He is our hero. He is good by definition. He breaks through the wall with ease and once he has done so, it is clear that this was the right thing to do all along. He advances. The fifth obstacle is our hero himself. But our hero is not to be beaten by such obvious trickery. He merely steps aside and lets himself pass. The sixth obstacle is a pulsing wall of desire. And here at last our hero falters. For our hero wants to break through this wall, but this wanting is the stuff of the wall itself. And if our hero did not desire, then he would not act and would remain trapped. There is no escape, and even though our hero desperately wants to not want, he is still wanting. Our hero paces back and forth, trying to think of a way out. Dr. Brain, it appears, has defeated him at last. What our hero does not realize, however, is that this last obstacle is not part of Dr. Brain's plan. Our hero, so intent on escape, has found an obstacle that has always restrained him, though he has never noticed it before. Dr. Brain, too, is trapped by desire as are the rest of us. When our hero sees this, he thinks only that Dr. Brain's victory is complete, that Dr. Brain has finally conquered the world. Well, people, thank you. Thank you for being here. Another round of applause for all of our readers, please. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, A.V. Folk. Thank you, Library. Our next show is going to be for the anthology Beat Not Beat, which I helped edit, but also Rich Ferguson, and will involve some pretty spectacular local readers. And that will be the second Thursday of next month, which will be also next year. So please feel free to join us then. Have a good evening.