 So, I'm starting with a haiku, and I remember ending with a haiku. Vermillion whispers, buffalo cloud sunrise, trampling the sky, sacred profanities. Now I lay me down to sleep, may the stars spill from subway pockets and inspire the milky way to tell all the lies you kept from me. I pray the earth my soul to keep, since you are the singer of Sumerian lullabies. Sing me in Nana, queen of heaven and earth. If I should die before I wake, make sure baby Jesus is crucified before a daybreak, so that all that is wanton becomes visible. I pray the dust my soul to take in a drenching rain with fire all around. So I might know which tales to inhale, and which ones to blow through, like when a mucka and a vada, thumbing rides, red-eyed, tuxedo clad, and oh, so low and dry. The sky knows, but only talks to the birds. The ocean knows, but only tells the whales. The trees know, but speak to one another underground. Thank you. Don't feel obliged to clap. I just want to make sure you know that's the end of one poem that I'm moving on to the next. These are new poems, just recently written. This is called The Recipe. I make salad, romaine, carrots, pears, chives. The recipe is handed down from generations of ghosts in the kitchen. I see the eyes of a street-dying man. I see the eyes of a perpetrator. I see the consequence of unsheltered innocence. Last year, I complained about the birds waking me at dawn, twittering, singing, telling lies and stories, finch and sparrow, junko and robin. I complained, and now they are all gone, except for the crows. Decisions about circumcision, the knock at the door becomes insistent. If an infant is greeted with sexual stimulation followed by mutilation, what are the repercussions when he becomes a man? Cucumbers, arugula, mushrooms. I left home when I was 16 with clothes, a guitar and a car. What more is needed to become an adult? Lemon juice, olive oil, double cheddar. I chop and cut, pondering the ontological imaginings of honeybee and wolf pup. The doctors believe babies don't feel pain when all four limbs are strapped to a board. They stop crying after the first incision. What else would one do when fully tethered and raped? Microcosm, macrocosm, the front door speaks volumes to the man and attend on the sidewalk in 36 degree weather. Whether or not we agree on a perspective, what is cannot be ignored. Crow people, why have you become so abundant? Why have you replaced the others? Why are the grebes settling on the south shore of Clear Lake? Now when I hear one bird sing near my window, I listen with fettered remnants of remorse. The mail comes in droves of unsolicited advertisements. I didn't know that I didn't want a Roomba and can't distinguish the favorable properties of one humidifier in an avalanche of humidifiers from the next. Comparison shopping, chopping, garlic, celery, a toilet no matter what the line and hue flushes shit away, flailing gestures and conversations, a gorilla signs, save the earth, help the earth. She says that she loves humans even though we are stupid. The earth protests gently at first, fires, floods, tsunamis, a slow species extinction. And like the starving mother bear with starving cubs, she will slay us so that she may live to procreate another day. Sprinkle thyme, rosemary, dill. What is the next ingredient? Thank you. This is called Stealing Magnolias. I wrote it after I read James Cagney's book, Steel Magnolias and the Time of Chaos Theory. So not the actor from the 40s. This is a living poet, James Cagney, armored and humbled, sobered and encumbered, equally distended and contracted with ink and quill. Will you write me into a poem? Leave it with a click of a mouse, impose demons on my clavicle and scent my bones with jasmine. I would be happy knowing I smelled so sweetly even after I decayed. We could ponder the apocalypse like Olmec statues, sympathetically unperturbed. Thank you. I wrote this, Julia Vinograd died, the poet, about a month ago. So I wrote this poem for her about her kind of, Julia. Have you heard this one? Julia Vinograd, George Tirado, David Gallabhan, me shuffle into a soma donut shop at 1 a.m. After stumbling through paradise, motley, muttering and cursing the powers, whoever they might be, we order coffee and donuts without surrendering a single coherent syllable. This was the one time Julia didn't try to sell me her book. Always a new book, always a pitch, always $5, always a home run, even when it was five of my last 10. I was 16 when I worked at the Wren, Julia frequented the Med, but occasionally came to my counter. Impressed and flustered, I gave her free coffee. I was always giving away coffee to anyone who I thought deserved it. And Julia, with her bubbles and poems, was an icon even then, a statement that the 60s hadn't died despite disco, the Bee Gees and mirror balls. And then there was Bavar, where the corrugated steel walls bulged and vibrated with the coagulations and cogitations of David Lerner, Vampire Mike, Dominique Lowell, Joey Cook, Eli Coppola and Julia, huffing and grunting and disparagement or nodding and stamping in yellow and black pork pie hat approval. Anne Wood purred and hissed poems that cured heartbreak with a heart attack. David West wild and beguiled before disappearing like a paralegal genie. Sparrow Laughing 113 talked revolutionary talismanic trailer trash. Andy Klosson waged working class rants and Steve Arnston crooned elegies to the coast. Alternately, my cat sitter and my house painter, Steve hates cats but preferred my bed to his car. Andy painted my house, including all the windows, pepto-dismal pink. And Jen and I tried to maintain order like two pipsqueak bailiffs at a hanging trial. Julia was all business, banging the walls and benches with her cane, starting no-nonsense poetry cop in a juvie classroom. I remember making everyone put their hand on their crotches and saying, I pledge allegiance to my cunt. Did I really do that? It was such a sleepy little corner on Guerrero Street, no organic handcrafted ice cream or coffee, no skeleton jewelry or smart water, just an unremarkable bar with a baby babar on the window. But the concrete floored and corrugated steel backroom writhed and boiled with a vagrant class that ate more words than food most days. Most everyone on SSI except me, sacrilegious school mom armed with analogy, bristling with idiot compassion and the smoking idolatry of the word. My last reading at the Paradise, pregnant and unprepared, Julia was coolly distant. No interest in birthing anything except the gestating poem. After 17 years of maternal hibernation, I read my first serious poem at BookSync in Alameda. Julia was there listening and actually emphatically exclaimed, it was a really good poem. Thank you. This is called Rites of Passage 2019. Come a friend or foe, the dice is only loaded as the throw. Beguile me with beatitudes and infinitudes of prayer and melody that we may become whole despite the circumference of injustice. Deities may embrace the few, but birdsong is for all. That which brings peace begets peace, a moment of home must sustain. Though our sons wander in realms so distant, they eclipse the thin wall between us. Come, destiny resides in the palm of creation. We become of love in an age of madness. I guess I'm going to read this one. I think I'll do my song after this. This is called Public Transportation. When I was six or seven and wore my hair and braids, I became part of the spectacle in Boone, North Carolina on the Tweedsea Railroad Wild West theme park ride. Along with tanned and buckskin clad actors waving tomahawks as the train passed by all the little alabaster kids ran up asking, are you an engine? A spider parachutes on a puff of wind that carries it from tree to tree or across oceans, weaving a singular strand of silk connecting past and future and you to me. Above the BART platform, a jelly-faced waxen man calls down to three cinnamon princes. He throws them a bill and yells, it's great to see you guys dancing on the train instead of killing and robbing people. The lodge pole pine, among others, can only reproduce when fire melts the resin in serotonous cones that release its seeds. At the San Francisco airport, I wait for a plane with Jesus who, while walking through a restaurant, almost drops a tray of dirty dishes shoved into his belly by a stone-eyed Texan. We carry the vision and wisdom of our ancestors like seeds deep beneath our skin. Try to embrace a middling existence, climb propitious ladders that lead to storm drains beneath the feet of the elite, hoping for a glimmer of human recognition. A mourning dove-hued father cries about the times he witnessed his adopted mahogany child walk into a corner store to buy candy as the shopkeeper bristles and growls as though the little boy has already committed a crime. Like rabbits in a field of low grass, we seem too terrified to meet the gaze of the being beside us despite our familial solicitude. An Ashen skin poet tells me that I'm not any more Japanese than he, that my heritage has been bleached through my skin through assimilation. After acknowledging the generational scars left by persecution, incarceration, and silence, the proliferation of seedlings can only be cannily awakened by the purifying flame. On the train, the guerrilla dancers flip and tumble in gyrating double-jointed grace. They are carnival joyous, just shy of raucous, knowing their place all too well. Remember the spider's audacity and the strength of her filament. I think I need to do one more to like, lighten, lighten it up a little, to find it. I'm going to read an old poem. I can't find it, so I guess I'll read it. No, I'll read it. I'll read this one. I am a woman who believes in keeping her mouth shut till she knows what she's talking about, but is rarely able to do so. I am a woman who wallows in ambivalence because she never quite realizes that she can leave anytime she chooses. I am a woman who believes in children even when they defy me and believe me to be the enemy. I am a woman who hates punctuation, who believes in the meanings of words even when she can't spell them. I am a woman who believes our nature may be immutable, but our behavior is not. I am a woman who believes in raw, excruciating palpable change. I am a woman who believes there are never enough names for love who believes in making them up. I am a woman who believes in keeping her eyes open no matter what the cost.