 Hello and welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming to this month's iteration of Poem Jam. I'm John Smalley, a librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Center on the third floor, where most of our poetry books reside. While I'm waiting for a couple more folks to join us, I wanna take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a program that's going on currently. So on behalf of the Public Library, we want to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatushaloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this place and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatush have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside and work in their traditional homeland recognize that we benefit from living and working here. We wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramatush community by acknowledging their ancestors and relatives and by affirming their first rights as sovereign peoples. Or I should say sovereign rights as first peoples. Tonight's program happens every month, the second Thursday of each month. The program will be filmed for our archives. And if you do not wish to be filmed, please let me or one of the other staff members know that this series is curated by the poet Kim Shuck. Some of you may know that Kim is also an artist and there is currently an exhibit of her artwork, textural glass bead artwork on the main library sixth floor. This exhibit translations from here will be up through September 10th. So please do stop by when the library is open. You can learn more about our upcoming programs by grabbing a flyer such as this one, advertising Kim's exhibit or the library newsletter. These are all on the table to your right side. There's also coffee and cookies on the table. Please help yourself to that. And that ends my announcement. So with out further ado, I wish to turn the microphone over to Kim Shuck. Please give her a warm welcome. It is an enormous pleasure to welcome to this microphone that one, if that's the one you want. The Owls writing group who meet at the Bernal branch of the San Francisco Public Library. We have a very full house, so I am not going to do big introductions apart from saying that I really, really have enjoyed the times that I've worked with this group. Just an absolutely delightful bunch of people and really accomplished poets generally hosted by a medi-moderated maybe by Paul Corman Roberts, who is no stranger to this microphone. And without further ado, our first reader is Helen Dandenberg and the next one is going to be Lee Jenkins, so be prepared. Come on up Helen. Thank you. Memory and now. You made me a hole in the floor, they said. Calls between us every night. I look and look bewildered. Then three days, no call. Pinkish linoleum with brownish pink flowers. No hole. Dorothy Sidney, children Aaron, Carol Ann, Mark lived there. I am a very seasoned, experienced warrior. Across East 96th Street, we lived in the big apartment with my mother's parents, where at first all the sisters and their husbands lived together. Then a call with tippy-toe, trepidatious explanation rested from him by me. Okay. I love silly. A zap-a-dap-dap, I know nothing of that. Zap-a-dap-tap, ah-ha. Dutch, Dutch, such, such. Gustafs, Dutch, licorice, licorice. Drops, deliciously sweet and soft. Bears, deliciously sweet and cuddly. Cats, deliciously sweet and firm. Oh-oh-choo-choo-ee-choo. Don't eat the whole bag at once. Don't eat the second bag at once. Don't eat the third bag at once. Oh no, not all three at once. I sit here, bop, bop, bop. I read the ingredients, bop, bop, bop. A shocking, ah-ha, moment. I can't believe my eyes. Gelatin' pork? I read all three bags. Oh-oh, say it isn't so. Pork, gelatin, gelatin, pork. What's a culturally nice Jewish woman from Brooklyn to do? Boo-hoo-hoo, say it isn't true. Black hole on a leash. Don't say that again, not again. I'm out and about, climbing trees. If you think that isn't hard at my age, riding the merry-go-round in the wrong direction even if it makes me puke. Hello, I say to passersby like a friendly puppy, but I don't jump up to chew on their fingers. Try this particular doughnut flavor of art class. Jump into this other pond of theater improv class. The water is friendly, shallow. You can swim well enough. Look at the ceiling while you float on your back in the colors of a new watercolor class. Savor the flavors of new friendships like a box of seized candy. A flamenco dance on the heads of moles that pop up saying you didn't do it right or enough or hired enough or in the right order. Play the castanets, charm the thoughts so they go away, go away dancing. Seek out the sunflowers starting to bloom in the side space allowed you by your next door neighbor. They say hello, thanks. What else do you have to say? The hole is bottomless, the leash ebbs and flows. Let's talk. The morning, a sunny day. Yes, hello, so glad to see you. Let's talk. I love the way you raised look today, reaching from the back windows way back to the front hallway behind the steps, the wonderful shadows behind the big upside down curve of the kitchen sink faucet. The snake hose lives there. I sit on the couch, feel your lovely warm presence. Stay longer than noon when you leave to go further out to the garden. I get jealous, stay with me. Don't go, I want to keep you. I know you must go on with your day. I am selfish, don't care. You go, my restlessness drives me out to find you. Ah, there you are, let's talk. Melding, two people met a long time ago, made a life, made two children, lived in a culture absorbed by the children. She is here, now, then we'll be gone. The culture, many facets, interesting. She flourished, but wondered about the others. Went, explored, there existed another world out there, how to meld them together. She is here now, then we'll be gone. Melding like flour, water and flavoring, like a bouquet of mixed flowers, like a box of assorted chocolates, like a bunch of different dogs, like the merging of entering bus passengers, like two souls connecting. She is here now, and then we'll be gone. This is the last one, default to the heart. Default to the heart, you must in the time remaining. Bubbling annoyance, sloppy irritation, fixing someone's speech, what is that? But bubble gum on your shoe, irrelevant, annoying. Slick it off and dispose of it. Don't waste precious time in the forever of your life. Get to the heart of the matter, the heart, the heart. Boom, ba-da-boom, boom, ba-da-boom. These phone calls are what is. Listen, remember, say what you want him to hear, don't let him interrupt, remember the voice. Laugh together about whatever, little anything, the dust ball on the floor, the bumble bee on the blue cornflower, laughter, compassion, empathy, are good deposits in the forever of your life. Check your balance. What needs beefing up? Needs more attention, work on it. Time is limited in the forever of our lives. Thank you. Okay, our next reader is Lee, and after that, it's gonna be Debra Gerson. Okay, let's try this one. Okay, Haunting San Francisco for Kathy. So many scenes can't be photographed. An overheard remark. Like I said, it all depends on how you look at it. A smile exchanged between strangers. The crazy man swearing in iambic pentameter. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you motherfucker. The child screaming in her father's arms, no, no, no, no. He replies so softly, I can't hear him. The man who travels with his piano playing requests. Come to me, my melancholy baby. Everybody does. People walking barely visible, wrapped inside their blankets against the sandstorm of urban life, trash swirling with dust and dirt, that wind. That woman I used to know and love, crossing the street, impossible. She's long gone from this earth, still. Her shape-shifting shadow startles me all the time. She should be here, would be, if not for circumstances. Her hair, whispering around her face, her left-leaning gait, looking around, taking in everything. But she's missing her dog, Seaver or Carney, who must be with her somewhere just down the block. This is an aphora for Betty and me. And it's a collaboration with Betty Johnson who was a much-loved owl who passed away recently. And I took six lines from a 67-line poem of hers to start each of six stanzas of mine. And I think as you all know, an aphora is a repetition of words and phrases in poetic lines. And almost everybody loved her. And she felt the same way, too. And she never left a room lonely. And she left easily and often. And she promised to be back soon. And that wasn't always true. And she stood up to competition and gave up things she wanted and complained about it sometimes and wasn't able to change. And she had to laugh at herself. And she loved without discrimination. And not everyone believed that. And so she worried no one loved her. And she missed herself sometimes and had nothing to give. And she held up everyone's end of the conversation and reminded herself not to talk so much. And yet everybody laughed at her jokes and she always liked that. And that was one thing she could be sure of. And she never failed to say thank you. And that was one thing her mother taught her. And it never hurt to be kind except to those who were unkind to her. And she became brand new. And that was not easy. And she worked at it every day and night when the moon came up and the cat slept in her lap. Holy Redeemers. As I told you before, I sometimes see ghosts walking down the street wearing the faces of people I love who are no longer with us. Memory is not so easily tamed as flesh. You can't put it in a box, bury it or burn it. Moments from the past catch up with me waiting at the crosswalk. That's stupid argument I can't remember now except I almost got run over trying to get away. Nobody gives away forgiveness at funerals, but they should. Along with those religious cards with the beautific pictures of saints and prayers on the back, I would like to add a personal note. Saint Sebastian shot through with arrows still undaunted. You won our hearts if not the race. Our Lady of Mercy holding her red heart in her chest. You always loved the ones others put back on the shelf. Dear Saint Alice, patron saint of paralysis, praying for us all. May your limbs and hearts be ever-embraceable. Angels trying to sing on the subway, but nobody is listening. Don't be so hard on yourself. And for the agnostics, a get out of jail free card. Someone loved you and you never knew it. Now you can love yourself, can't you? Ah. Thank you, Deborah. The next one's gonna be Grace Duncan. Oh, I thought I was your next. Oh, I am. Are you? It's gonna be good. I could be nervous about something. My orders. Go closer and tilt up, because I'm the tall person. Moralless. Mesopotamia. No one knows how hard, dark the darkness. I know, I read, I listen. When did I last think of Mesopotamia? Yesterday or the day before. Mesopotamia, headline story in the New York Times, where civilization so-called began. The Fertile Crescent, where rivers, tigress and Euphrates with their tributaries for more tributaries dug out from sources unnamed or dammed up or held back. We heard of them in the Bible, tigress and Euphrates. Dammed up or held back, stopped the salt from the sea, invidious invader of the fresh water of tigress and Euphrates. We mammals, human and smaller, demand fresh water. Glowing star shapes on water flowing free, stick a finger in and bring it to my mouth. Oh, salt. The cradle of civilization with so many towns, villages, settlements, along so many tributaries, and the human struggle, conflict, who gets the fresh water, who tastes the salt? The cradle of civilization, where humans unable to harvest goodwill or mind while water flows. Hummingbirds visit pockets of green, find red flowers with bits of sweetness within and suck. Hold till the end. Sadness runs swiftly through my dreams. I turn right side, left side, check the pill container. What day is this? Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Flip open the day, empty. I offer my back or he offers his. Reach my arm around, searching for a resting place on top of a shoulder or between two knees. Coordination problems. Sadness runs swiftly through my dreams. Drink some water, get up to pee, return again, grab a tissue, blow my nose. Sadness runs swiftly through my dreams. Recall mother, father, brother all long gone, and I became the comforting one for a daughter who'd crawl into my bed night after night and then grew up and left home. Her body insists on company. Songs repeated, good night Irene, good night Irene. I insert her name and last night I had the strangest dream. I'd never dreamed before. Now a husband says, tell me a story. Sadness runs swiftly through my dreams. Older now, beset with bony knees, I use drugs. Place a pillow to cushion their contact. Woundless, I forget cancer. Touch the pale scar line, pubis to navel. Belly button jokes from brother Bill. On my desk rests his slide rule with it in its leather case. Could I learn to use it? His laundry appeared in my dream, needed folding. Now I finish a wash. I'm reminded of the broken clothes line. What to do, sadness runs swiftly through my dreams. So the next one I requires, it's a found poem which means I literally saw the words and extracted them. The words of Greta Rideout, San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 1978. I was pretty lonely. I didn't know anybody. I had to get a job. I was on welfare. I didn't have a car. It seemed exciting to get married. Let's just say there was a lot of violence in our marriage. When I tried to express my opinion, he couldn't stand it. He couldn't understand I wanted to be my own person. We just didn't get along. The more I expressed myself, the worse it got. I was trapped. I had to leave. No money. No way to leave. There was a lot of violence. I was trapped. If I hadn't called, I would have sunk into the gutter. I didn't want to live like that. Live my life like that. My mother taught me to think a lot of myself. If I hadn't called, if I had say, I may have been brainwashed into thinking I had deserved it. I'll say. This woman called her husband's actions towards her rape. It was her words. And this, a little short story of someone who is not so present with me these days. Adri and I got to know each other, to meet each other and to love each other in that big apartment on the Upper West Side. Our residents in that apartment ended without little notice and we had to find another place to live. Now people call it couch surfing. But we did find beds and sublets to live in for the next year or less before we moved to California. I counted seven places in all before we moved. Somehow we maintained loving connection and equanimity despite the challenge of remembering how to get wherever we were living. Which subway train, which house are we in? So the apartment on Hancock Street gave us more light, air, space, and lower rent than anything than possible in New York City. Now I think that giving up that apartment was a confusing mistake. We thought we wanted to live collectively. That was a bust. And in the next apartment, Adri felt the need for a little private space. She moved a mat into the side of a big large, a walking closet and she would go in there out of the closet and into the closet. And since then I've learned that she has always assured herself a room of one's own. Adri was able to express her own needs and feelings with clarity and kindness, an example I sought to emulate, not always successfully. Adri knew my parents and my brother and I knew her parents too. Her mother's name was Leonore and I contained to recognize her voice on the phone, which I sometimes imitated to Adri's chagrin. Now I feel regretful. Even embarrassed. I and we could talk of class, but sometimes miss its imprint in daily life. Cooking, she learned to make egg rolls, I think, and did so. French toast, I did, I did that. Almost 10 years together, years of honesty, courage, tenderness, also confusion, fears, and unsaid thoughts and feelings. Now I treasure and honor the loving and brave spirit that you gave me to the world and the world. I'll stop there. Thank you. It's going to be Grace and then Karen. Okay, holler at me if you can't hear me. Cross hairs of tooth and ego after cue our hand. No drifters leave here alive, not even floaters or weak-willed wannabes, not in one-way window buses shirking on skateboards, standing bird-legged on corners hookers used to own, hypnotized by screens, screaming on Instagram about new beers and smelly cheeses, trampling the feast that brought them, leaving leftover lattes and quiche crumbs no beggar would touch. I saw these floaters with my eyes wide open in the middle of the day. I got scared, so I went to the Kaiser neurologist without an appointment. She said, don't worry, the pendulum swings, but it leaves scars. So I split and couldn't find my car for days, but I was relieved. I knew no drifters could leave there alive when they met the cross hairs of truth and ego. I went back home to deal with the funky girls, fricking and fracking in a moldy mirror. They were heavy into cube and slice, only dealt the cards to each other, aimed the poison dart straight for the heart, then they had no mercy with the pinking shears. Later, I heard that cube and sliced each other had to live on separate floors. The one who laughed into her armpit had no back windows. They moved to Oakland when the president's changed chairs, had a house of peace and didn't speak anymore. I had the last snort and it was sweet. This is serious nonsense. If they can inhabit the same cube, two men's can think alike. It's not schizophrenic. It's just hard to keep the wheels straight after the army of none left only folding chairs and locked up the mantra. Kiss the wind. Kiss the wind without guilt. It chills and pants at the back door with wild tiger cats waiting for scraps. Pop open the red umbrella and dance in no brain to percussion in your head, while another withers more and more. Capture the essence of beauty in a cup with a broken handle, spider webs on the windowsill, though another sees only snakes and petrified trash. How's your dreams in a hooser in a back room that looks on the cyclone tree the troubled child climbs no matter whose voice calls to him? Does he know his father will be murdered by fire? Imagine, survive the embittered anima, jitter and jump in on Saturday mornings when the house is vacant. Slide the hallways on slippery feet, dare to be ebullient. Fling open doors, dare to be ebullient while the albatross flies. Kiss the wind through battered shutters, your mama rescued from a train. She always saw possibility and muted her ears to the wailing. Laugh out your belly button so hard to snort through your nose unembarrassed, sometimes that's all there is. Praise the ocean, reject mistaken memories, regrets that stop time, tiptoe and stomp in honor of living in spite of more abundity, be kind and wish for wonder. She remembers being pretty. Elephant's glide flap aprons shaped ears in the wet blue sky toward buffalo clouds parting for steeples and astonished ancient stone houses straddled like crack cookie jars among weeds of concrete skyscrapers wearing sunglasses remembering the naked sun. Gossan stilts don't wait for stoplights. They own memories forgivable and forgettable, exploding in the bottom of a broken glass exploding in the bottom of a broken basket. The queen of tears ranks the rulers on the kitchen table and makes sure all the pencils work before she dusts around the edges hoping for a surprise. Crows she's afraid of send her messages from across town. She puts on her father's faded fedora, spits on her shoe and turns in circles. This she learned from the grandmother she never met. Her house is so old the doors don't shut and all the keys in the collage don't work anyway. Her no color hair is too long for an old face. Her cheeks withered apples now and she wonders what to do with the drier lint and the blood from the dead chicken. Her mind is a Frida Kahlo painting. In the humility of the laundry room she never knows to buy anything red unseen because it's likely to be too yellow. Even now with clown feet and polka dot hands she smells of satin sachet and remembers being pretty. And last one, baptized in fog. Baptized in fog like a new cross on top of a hill suspended in the wind kissing the rain waiting to open like a canyon, sing an aria to no one, dance on point barefoot except for purple nails. Throw away the cracker box past, pick up your broken heart and swallow it whole. You will never be this again. Look back on your wisdom, drive blind around the curve, plaster your wall with what you know. Be brave, be alone, be among. Stop, start, bend, break, but don't be brittle. You are baptized in fog. Remember. Thank you. Hey, this is Karen and the next reader will be Sachiko Hamada. Is this good? Thank you, Kim Shuck, for all you do for the community and for poetry. And thank you to my sister Mary for ironing my shirt. Choice. The test comes back positive. What to do this time when everything is different from last time? Anyone in her right mind would schedule the procedure. Everyone says that's what she did last time when it made perfect sense, though she'd had to fly to New York where it was legal. Chicago, that bitter winter. Guillaume, the waiter, leaning close. More bread for you? Setting another warm roll beside the cup of soup. The next day she'd gone there again to get out of the cold. I am pretty, you are pretty. Let's sleep together. Did she forget something? Her last period, was it Christmas, New Year's? 21 then, squeaking by. The last thing she needed was a kid. Poland, the doctor told her when she asked where he was from. You were better than I thought you'd be, he'd said when it was over. 10 years later, she's not cold. She's not hungry. Though this is the man that she had to have. When she gives him the news, he says, you know what to do? Hastily pulls on his jeans, laces up his running shoes, lays a crisp $100 bill on the dresser. She uses that to get a massage. How do you want your eggs? Pretty soon you can get eggs from skin cells, apparently. If you have good insurance, sex will no longer be the method by which most people make babies, according to this writer, making women not so necessary to the process. Whoa, hold on. Why is this process even desirable? Let's say skin cells to make eggs are derived from a man with a middle-class income and good insurance who wants to make a baby with his own DNA and that of a partner. This method is just the ticket. Quite a departure from the rhythm method, the diaphragm, the pill, old crapshoot processes that worked or failed but made babies on a regular basis. How sexy was skin on skin so old-fashioned? Health insurance isn't equitable for all men and women, though, unless privileged men and women will not be using the skin cell method of harvesting eggs due to inferior insurance, plans that they have. They'll proceed to have sex. Maybe all the skin cells will hum along appreciatively as they make the baby. Who is this baby? One from the egg of a woman fertilized by sperm, one from skin cells from someone who chooses this method to contribute personal genes to a process supported by top-notch health insurance. I didn't have any insurance 40 years ago when I had my baby. While mulling over abortion, I chose to proceed with the pregnancy because I was 32, a woman with a job and apartment. I'd used a barrier method, but that baby broke out of its hypothetical cell. With or without insurance, women and men will keep having sex. Futuristic babies will be born using new methods. Cells will do what they do through usual and unusual processes. Stepping out of the shadow, and this is after Gwendolyn Brooks and Terrence Hayes. How happy I am today. I've just come from the doctor. She stayed at the computer, but looked right in my eyes long enough to say the mammogram shows that the area in front where I found the cancer is clear. Later in the yard, I shared the good news with my sis as we play ball with the dog. You're so lucky, she says. That's my new through line, I replied. That's my new life. But I do remember the darkness. I remember when all I knew was to wanna drink. All I craved was to disappear into it. I couldn't imagine I'd go to a better place where I'd find a strange light in dull rooms, rented for a song in the basements of churches. I'd sit in back and somebody'd give me an inch of warmth or a yard of personal and peaceful space. And look at me now. Thank you. So our next poet is Sajiko. And after that will be Maggie Roberts. Often, she's just one ear and untouched clay sleeping on the tatami floor based by a lay of bright sunshine through shoji screens. All of a sudden, sundering screams. Grandfather, grandmother, father and his sister snorling at each other. With palpulating heart, she's searching for her mom who's seen nowhere. She start crawling with hands and knees trying to get out of the room. Her father is in post-war depression. He insisted he instilled in her perfect condition at dark. Her mother is infatuated with her butt adorned. She imbued her with curious haze. When she turned four, she took her soul out of her heart and buried in deep in the earth. She became a shadow butterfly with a salite soul. She's wandering ceaselessly, following a voice almost unnoticeable to a balmy forest breeze. The perfume of the desert. She laced on the crest of a wave in the Macalero sky. Painting, early summer with blue sky. The garden was covered with strawberries. A local tree bowed down yellow orange fruits. Ginger plants sent out pungent scent. Someone spilled milk over a tatami with wild aroma. A quarrel broke out between my father and my aunts. They chased around furiously in the room before they flung the door open to jump into the garden. They longed and longed in the strawberry bed, crushing red berries under their bare feet. I was seven, parched on the tree, peering from behind the leaves. The world suddenly split in two. Before me, everything was red against bright, clear blue. Warm rain. She was returning from downtown. As she got off the express bus, the rain started in Torrents. It was a warm rain. She got wet to her skin, but kept walking escalated. Soon she got lost, finding herself in a field with a tiny house. She went in. The house was invaded by red and yellow tulips. The lightning through the roof slanted into their heads, swallowing its force. The flowers glared like wild hissing snakes. Scared enthralled, she stood immobile, but before long stepped forward, stretching her heart. Red flower. An old woman lived in a shack in the forest. She picked mushrooms, talked with bird and animals, but not with people. She had a small lacquer box, and there was a wind in it. She talked with the wind every day. One day, the wind escaped from the box. She waited for a while, but it didn't return. Soon she went looking for the wind in seven bright continents. Once she came close to catching the wind's tail, but didn't. Tired and resigned, she returned home. She put the red flower in the box. The wind returned. New Island. An old woman lived in a shack, parched on the rocks in front of the ocean. The wind and the waves lowered piercingly. No one came near. Just before the shack, a tiny patch of black sand behind it, a mountain with a streak of smoke. The old woman sat in a bamboo lacquer, meditating her past lives in seven lands of brightness. One day, a young man passed along the beach. He seemed a beautiful glass deer. He stopped in front of her and looked into her eyes. Alhambrila. He called and walked away. He came to the beach time and again. Each time he called to her Alhambrila. But the last time he came, his voice was penetrating. He called to her Alhambrila from the expanse of clear sky. The mountain trembled. The night she woke up in a dream, she was a hot red river of lava. Shooting high up to the blinding sun before landing in the ocean to form a new island. But if someone, someone don't know Alhambrila, it's, it's a, you know, it's Arabic. So Maggie's next. And after Maggie, we have Phoebe, Greek. Part one, you've got no business in the city coyote. You have no urbanity. I was feral once, wild like you. You could have snatched me up in your savage mouth. I shudder a little thinking of it, but you can't touch me now. I'm a domesticated cat. I sit here on my sofa and listen while you yip and how, like a junk sick poet. Yes, I know poetry, Ginsburg, Burroughs, Plath. I know music too. Mozart, Lizzo, hip hop, jazz. Sounds you'll never hear, mister, though you live in the cool that is San Francisco. Part two, cowardly. That's you coming here because you think you are nobody's prey here, but you are wrong, Buster. Dead wrong. You've dodged many cars many times, like it's a game like me when I was a wild thing. But what you don't know is that some of those cars are out to get you. Turn your scrawny ass into curbside roadkill. You thought your wildness would save you, but you fucked up, Buster, by killing cats. There's folks here that love cats more than coyotes, so you better leave. Scrammaroo, as they say. Part three, oh, you're back. I can smell your suffocating scent drifting down the hill. Guess you had to lie low for a while after you killed that three-legged Siamese. He was a friend of mine named Franco Hara. So, yeah, I'm pissed. And then you had to go and kill a Pecanese puppy in its own yard, wearing a handmade rainbow sweater during Pride Week, no less. So, yeah, Buster, you better get out of here while you still can. This is another poem, unfinished poem. I once had a future child that never was. If I'd let her live, I'd call her Lorca. I'd swaddle her in casitas and gazales. I'd shelter her from the yellow wind and the tolling bells. I'd throw my body between her and the firing squad, and if they killed us both, I'd want them to bury us together beneath an olive tree in a far-off place where shepherds come and go and where nightingales sing songs of forgiveness. This is the last one. Unsalvageable. The September sky is scary. Its colors leeched out by encroaching wildfires. This happens every fall now. I hate that fires have their own season, like lobsters or cherries. My coffee grinder is angrier than usual. Its roar startles the cats. They knock a vase of red dahlias to the floor as they flee. I cut my feet on the shattered vase and tracked blood across the house. Someone has left the bathroom window open. It smells like my father's sweaters when he smoked three packs of Marlboro Reds a day. I miss him more than ever. Uh-oh, the Band-Aid box is empty. Thanks. Okay, Phoebe. And then after you is Daniel. I'm going to do this one. I was going to do this last, but now I'm doing it first. Lessons from Megalaya. It's not that the sky isn't falling. Stars, hunks, chunks, bits of light. I am a golden retriever. Catch this piece. Know that one. Run, fetch, leap, fix, catch, solve, help. There's a hole in the world where the hope runs out. I run around plugging things. Humans can get it ass backwards, push what needs pulling, prop up what should fall, grab the moon, drag it across the sky, tides and oceans all askew. Girls in plaid dresses work smarter, pump legs for the swing to go higher. In the wettest place on earth, bridges of wood, metal, concrete all wash away. They train trees to span chasms, air roots woven as living bridges. Generational tree toes dig deep down, hang on better than man made. Swing the swing. You are what you amplify. This is encounter. It's not so late, maybe 9 p.m. We're waiting for the 44 to take us home across the park. A quiet night, the lit bus comes mostly empty. I beeline towards a favorite seat, boyfriend left behind at the entrance. Suddenly an eruption, woman screaming, comes from nowhere onto bus, past driver, past boyfriend, past other passengers, directly onto my lap. Youngish, she stares up at me. Wild eyes, milk brown skin, stop screaming. It's okay, it's okay, I say. I think she is not quite right. Maybe drugs, maybe mental. She seems soothed, stares into my eyes. I keep talking, stroke her hair. Time passes. Time does not pass. A frightened animal, a past life. A policeman enters, takes her away. Her eyes still on me. This is Ralph doing my story poems today. He sits in my circle of hard metal chairs. I sit as far as possible, try to look away, wish he would go away. He is here every week. We all avoid him every week. I want to talk about my problem, a focusing too much on other people's problems. Not about his problems, he is a problem. He twitches, hits himself in the head, rubs his hair as if scrubbing it. The rest share their struggles, tips for dealing with life. One says that to blame someone else is to point one finger at them, which leaves the other three pointing back at you. Three fingers pointing back at me. My insides may be like his outsides. Emotional skin peeled off, raw, painful, walled off from others. Try to climb the wall, smash into the wall, stuck back inside the wall. I decide he is a lesson. How frightened should I be? I squint my eyes, try to see him without the twitches with a different personality. He's not bad looking, rather like a non-scary musician I know, or Dennis Weaver. I begin to dream of him at night, eating in a dream pizza parlor, riding on a dream bus, walking a dream sidewalk. I try talking to him at the meeting, escape route planned. I like your shoes, how is the coffee? He seems less cartoonish, more human. He lives in a halfway house, has no money, an older brother, an alcoholic mother. He is humble, doesn't press, learns it's my birthday, thinks he can afford to treat me to coffee. I accept. This is the last one. Experiments. Not everything announces itself, knocks and declares, I am here. Sometimes the arrival has passed before you know it. Spring-green on red-stemmed Japanese maple, turned to wind-burned in summer, golden autumn, throbbing oranges, slanted sunshine. Do I ever await the colorless winter? Yet there is a time when it has arrived, a sudden longing for hot soup and slippers. As a child, I would conduct experiments. How long will I remember this inchworm? Will the vanilla air return when I remove the covers from my head? Or most urgent, what does it feel like to fall asleep? I try and try to stay awake long enough to notice the point of crossing and miss it every time. Thank you. Daniel Raskin. Take a mic. I find microphones very intimidating. So if it's not working, give me a signal. This one is called Couples. I love you, the clock said to its hands. I hope you never rest at 12 noon or 6.30. Then it seems there's only one of you. I like two hands going round and round my face. Just give me electricity and my gears will turn you on for years. I love you, the trees said to the wind. You give me the best BJs. I love the way you flutter my limbs, caress my leaves, and cool me down after our steamy summer nights. I love you to the stream to its bed. I'll gurgle and bubble for you until the day I'm dry. I love the way you channel my energy through your polished grooves, how you arch me over waterfalls when I'm high on melting mountain snow. I love you, baby. How you make me whole. I want to curl up with you, a bowl inside a bowl. Ghosts. Mother ghost wants doctors' offices, hospital beds, and operating rooms where she mingles with ether. Gone is the life of gallbladder lower back. She spends days in art museums loving the peace that quiets her. She slips behind paintings to watch viewers viewing. Mother ghost haunts the kitchen, fridge, stove, sink, dishwasher. She knocks for your help making a salad, setting the table. She has cooked since 3 p.m. She will cast her spell of obesity because our children eat too much, too fast. She will stomp away from the table and vanish into the exhaust fan. Father ghost haunts the bookshelves. Some days when he loses his identity, he sighs in fiction. When he does crossword puzzles, he moans in the reference section, dictionaries, atlases, and the like. When he reads newspapers, Father ghost turns to political science, philosophy, and history. He listens to yowls of the ghosts that rise off the page. He seeks understanding from philosopher ghosts. He keeps track of the spaces where books have been borrowed and records the amount of time children have spent reading. He will assign the next book before the previous one is finished. He slips away into the depths of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Aunt Ada ghost tries to help mother ghost in the kitchen. She accepts sous chef and stops growling. She is not a mother. She steals mother ghost's children for weekends and takes them to plays, movies, concerts, Chinese and French restaurants. Aunt Ada ghost moves to San Francisco from Brooklyn after all her siblings and friends have vanished. She is thrilled for the first time to have her nephews alter herself in California who visit her in assisted living quarters where the food is terrible. Aunt Ada ghost evaporates behind the vitamins in a nutritional supplement store. Uncle Phil ghost haunts a jail where he was sent because he refused to fight in World War II and hovers about in the fumes of his dry cleaning shop which is a cover for his fencing operation. Whenever his nephews need something he brings it on his visits. He is very large. He records in a secret notebook every bear claw he eats every morning. Upon discovery his wife scolds him. He slouches away in shame. Mother, father, aunt, uncle ghost enjoy summer picnics on the beach. Good night, Cookie. Cookie knows to cream the butter whites in free fall, yolks shell nested. Chocolate marbled in by hand. Oven 350, timer ticking, spoon drop dough flattens round. Pajamas say I come first. Toothbrush wastes at attention. Good night, Cookie. Tiny planet. Tiny planet one day around in the middle of nowhere. What time it is nobody knows. Eight billion spin around. Only heaven can know us all. Yet we dance like wild horses like dolphins on crushing tectonics beneath forest canopies above the bone yards of the past. Tender arms embrace. Thank you. I don't actually end every one of these smiling like this. Thank you guys so much. Give yourselves a hand. Thank you, Owls. Thank you, audience, because, you know, we do need them. Thank you, AV department. And I just, this was so perfect. Thank you, John Smully in the San Francisco Public Library. I love what I do. I'm so glad. All right, so my partner is already holding up a camera. We usually do a photo of everybody who read in front of that mural, so we're going to put the lights on and then gather and take a snapshot. And thank you. Thank you for being here.