 Welcome on this beautiful sunny, sunny March day. It's great to see you all here, as always. Welcome to, I guess, our penultimate lunch pumps of the year. And it's a special one. We have Esther Boleyn with us in from Colorado. And I want to first start by thanking all the people that make lunch pumps possible. It's really, really a community effort. First and foremost, the library, as represented by Amber and the student workers, that help us out every time. The dean's office helps us fund the magic we do. And as does the English department. And the Arts Research Center have been such amazing allies as we try and make lunch pumps possible. They're forceful advocates for poetry and all the arts here at Berkeley. So thank you to the Arts Research Center. They will also be sponsoring the craft talk that Esther will be giving a little later in the afternoon. Before we start, if you could silence your phones. And without further ado, our director, Jeffer G. O'Brien. Thank you. Thank you, Noah. And thank you, Esther, for being here. I'm going to talk a little bit about Esther's most recent volume of cartography, which will hopefully help us here in real time, whatever work Esther presents. The of in of cartography identifies map making as a thing that the volume will consider. But it's also the genitive indicating origin and implied being that in this case comes from maps, being of cartography, that is bound by and to them to how land is divided into holdings and possessions, which then enclose people in arbitrary, abstracted, but all too real space, quote, a house made of mirage, as one poem puts it, or as another has it, a place some call California, a place of mirage and machines. If treaties, legislation, and policy, like maps, can turn land into fateful words, in Berlin's work, we sometimes see words become picture and place. In the poem, before we ever begin, the poem's second page makes a mountain range out of virguls that slash used to indicate a line break and out of periods, which look like mega ellipses of the unsaid or unsayable. This is not a mirage and doesn't intend to deceive. It is a site that may not quite be materially habitable, but it does express a different relationship between word and space, between the poetic sign and belonging, where possession is 0 tenths of the non-law. This distinction between what a state does to the land it occupies and how native peoples think and feel the land keeps coming up in language, whoever's, and in this book's verse. In the poem called The Birth and the Birthing Years, relocation is paraphrased as, quote, a governmental 10 gram. State powers an arrangement of geometric puzzle pieces, but those puzzle pieces are not static cartographic image or mirage, they can be reconfigured into other temporary forms, other maps, and non-maps, and that is one of the works of poetry and of this poetry. To show how else it has been and could be by taking the parceled out state of the land with its history of dispossession and relocation and all the euphemistic acts of language that have attended that history and turning that language, all language, both English and Navajo into a counter relation, quote, delicate flowers emerging from cement cracks, the temporary fragile thing that keeps eluding total domination and obscurity. Of cartography is divided into four sections that index the four cardinal points of the Dine, east, south, west, north. They might appear out of order to European eyes because they mark the movement of the sun across the sky. East is dawn, south is day, west evening, and north the night. This alternative ordering shows how contingent and how meaningful ordering is and how many orders lie latent or ignored within the dominant. Place and direction here are temporal. Maps are both fake and real, imagined and materially determining. Leighton, the book Boleyn confesses, quote, my real map marks the births of my four children. That's a map approaching actual habitability. Until then, we have this urgent, insurgent verse that relocates relocation and ofs of. Please join me in welcoming Esther Boleyn. Thank you for that great reading of the work and noting those ideas of mirage because that will be a topic that I'm gonna be kind of digging deeper into later this afternoon. So, yeah, today, she said that Esther Boleyn, you know, she said, I'm going to read the book, I'm going to read the book, I'm going to read the book, I'm going to read the book, I'm going to read the book, I'm going to read the book. So, I introduced myself in the Navajo language and, you know, with all this newer, acknowledgement of land, you know, I was really lucky to be at a conference a few weeks ago with Beth and other indigenous scholars and that's a really good time for us when we gather and, you know, we were talking about the Navajo introduction and it really is a land acknowledgement because it really does place us not only in and within the land but within the landscape of relationship and people. And so I'm, and then to be in a library which is really special also, I think, for writers and then also to have that really emphasized to be back on the Berkeley campus. I was an undergraduate here in the mid-80s and, you know, this is where I definitely left and grew a lot of roots here and so special time. So thank you for joining me here today. Thank you for all the folks who organized this. So I'm going to start with this brief opening and this is for all the indigenous people in the room. We were scattered on purpose. Then we scattered for survival. Jagged, choking thunder strikes, sections my limbs to nubs. Our creators handicraft sectioned into scattered bloodlines, wandering surface in search of the source contributing to the manufacturing of commercial commodification. The voidless vessels assemble the line of action figures and baby dolls, compress our compressed salt, sold by the pound, eventually cataloged and shelved, compressed, sold by the pound. We are re-territorializing our public spaces, reclaiming the direction of our scattering, instilling vapor into the soil of our land, the recollected wind in our songs. And I'm going to start reading from my first collection from the belly of my beauty. The beckon for liberation itches on my back. I scratched desert dried royals littered with fading Budweiser cans and roadside crosses dangling plastic flowers. I stumble from the grotesque reflection recycled. I stumble with my commod-filled body running a reedy's race. I stumble at my shadow raised by Los Angeles skyscrapers. My expression is a liberation functioning as a contrived reality boxed into Indian, identifying the branches of soul wounds into another contrived reality called American, also known as the United States in power until we salt our tongues, bridging callus shoulders, a great wall of burnt flesh, ideographs, tongue swollen from word arrows. Our stories etched on our backs and reading our backs does not start the healing process to be cleansed with winds from canyon de ché, luster of precious stones, hundreds of years smooth. When I was an undergraduate here, the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland was a safe spot for a lot of us students here. And I know that that place is seen better, better times. And they used to host every Wednesday a dinner, a community dinner, and a group of us students would ride Bart and go down there and eat with the community. Bluesing on the brown vibe, one. And coyote struts down east 14th feeling good, looking good, feeling the brown, melting into the brown that loiterers, rapping with the brown in front of the Native American Health Center, talking that talk of relocation from tribal nation, of recent immigration to the place some call the United States home to many dislocated funky brown. An ironic immigration, more accurate tribal nation to tribal nation. And coyote sprinkles corn pollen in the four directions to thank the tribal people, indigenous to what some call the state of California, the city of Oakland for allowing use of their land. Two. And coyote travels by Greyhound from Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA through Daneta to Oakland, California, USA, laughing. Interstate 40 is cluttered with RVs as far away as Maine, traveling and traveling to perpetuate the myth. Coyote kicks back for most of the ride, amused by the constant herd of tourists, amazed by the mythic Indian they create. At a pit stop in Winslow, coyote trades a worn beaded cigarette lighter for roasted corn from a middle-aged Navajo woman squatting in front of a store. And coyote squats alongside the woman, talking that talk of border town blues, of reservation, discrimination, and bluesing on the brown vibe, a Bilagana snaps a photo. And the Navajo woman stands silent, holding out her hand, requesting some of her soul back. Instead, she replaces it with a worn picture of George Washington on a dollar bill. And coyote starts on another air of corn, climbing onto the Greyhound, the woman still squatting, waiting, tired of learning not to want, waits there for the return of all her pieces. Three. And coyote wanders, right into a punca, sitting at the Fruitvale Bart Station, next to the punca as a seminal. And coyote struts up to the two, where y'all from? The punca replies, Oklahoma, pause. The seminal silent watches a rush of people climb in and out of the train headed for Fremont. The seminal stretches his arms up and back, stiff from the wooden benches, pause. He pushes his lips out toward the punca, slowly gesturing that he too is from Oklahoma. Coyote wanders, whereabouts? The punca replies, punca city, pause. The seminal replies, seminal. Coyote gestures to the punca, you punca? The punca nods his head in affirmation and coyote nods his head in contempt. To the seminal, he asks, you seminal? Pause. The seminal now watching some kids eating frozen fruit bars nods his head slowly. And coyote shares his smokes with the two and 10 minutes later, they traveled together on the Richmond train headed for Wednesday night dinner at the Intertribal Friendship House. Four. And coyote continues to blues on the urban brown funk vibe wandering in and out of existence, tasty, tasting the brown, rusty at times, worn bitter from relocation. And even I think in this first book, I was really looking at land as form and memory and a source. And I think, you know, because I grew up in the LA area and which is very different than the Navajo Reservation. This poem is about that directional memory. West. Let's begin with the first thing you remember. You lost a sandal in the move from the apartment on Mulford to the house on Poplar Drive, specific memory of wanting to go back and get the shoe. And in your head, you even telepathically announced it to everyone that you left your shoe at that old home, never to be seen again, part of you left behind, never to be seen again. North. Kissing me with your red lips, blessing me with your diva-ness, shiny black hair, dancing at Mr. Five's nightclub, swinging wet with heat, steam from the jungle you emerged, traces my image and blues ultra, our touch moved people off the dance floor and out of recliners, our touch tack sharp tickled memories of Maxine Honkingston and Norman Mailer and Gary Snyder trying to levitate the Pentagon, of small children selling chicklets, trying to levitate their image to heaven, our touch tender as ginger on tongue forks into the two of us. South. Christmas night in Southern California, rollerblading on the strand, night fishing off Hermosa Pier, walking on the beach wanting to sleep there, not wanting to wake in and someone's private property saying it's a drag. Yeah. Wanting to get a piece saying it's a drag because the sand belongs to the $6 million home in the background. When you were little, the water called your name to jump in, same as the stench of contamination warns you to stay out if all the sand in my boots could build my castle. East. When the awe of downtown Los Angeles scratches my back, the ghosts of native brothers and sisters of this tropical climate seers, great school, high school, never told of their existence. Indian land was far away in another world across state lines where grandparents plant corn and herd sheep on a brown-eyed, blue-eyed horse. I always forget LA has sacred mountains. Another, a little bit of the amusement of the reservation never wore off because there was always good fun. Herding sheep, jumping to Royals, riding horses, BB gun tag, card games. I never realized those times in my life could end, would end. Returning to California from the res, I always felt different. A sort of transformation occurred, like visiting a mystery land, spacious, no boundaries. I was free to roam unlimited, freed from street lights, cars, territorial gang warfare. The only limitation was the land. And somehow I seemed to break all her rules. I was constantly told not to touch this or capture that creature. I was unaccustomed to the mutual respect between people, the land, animals. But I soon learned the two worlds often clashed in me, creating blackness, a voice yearning to shout with boldness the way my aunt uses the Navajo language to get after me or tell a joke about me. And I'm gonna expand on that idea of that transcendence and that idea of borders later today. But that was from, there was an essay in the back of that first book. So I'm gonna read from, of cartography and in the introduction, there's before the directional kind of sections, there's this, and I call it kind of a precognitive state or of say sounds and sayings and events. And that's from this. So there's like construction and building. And the book really is kind of a vertical book. So this is sort of like an underworld type precognitive space, thinning into female mist. The spiral from my skull is tangled in the moon's belly, a zigzag attachment, a breathing entity, coal fired thoughts, deepening, widening, another moon approaches, like buffalo grassy germination, thwarted, intact under layers. Like what people say about Navajo culture, primitive, chance like a 12 step ladder, one lightness. Navajos are much more than prayer. Cut the tops off the letters of my words to air spaces, people fighting us, prayer full of, I use wifi to connect and three dry land and separation, Arroyo's in more than the spirit world methodology. I cut a window into the walls with my prayers. The flood spills across the page. Look, silver screens groom the sky. Their constant filtering brings frost. The iridescent paint Coyote uses over the low mountain, under the low moon, a firmament. Look, this is where mom hid the metal tin containing all of her stick toys, the flat sandstone slivers, the gun still stands. Look, this is what they call Navajo education. A speaker stand and a microphone hallowed out the air like cracking a can of pop. The first gulp of Navajos rotate like warehouse collections flattened on a screen, breathing in and in and never out. Distortion propelled as Promethean and people sit quietly in awe of the striptease, the digital transfers deluge the darkness, a marked deck of images displayed and people sit quietly stirred slightly from the stripper's blank stare and they vaguely remember clapping their hands. Visibility, not subjective speculation, excavating the credible, sudden hovering, only the matrix. Invisibility, not desexualization, structural opposition to savagism. The black printed text on paper, mile post 54, highway 491, dirt road 192, one and a quarter miles west. There you should find a house with a red metal roof. The house contains my Navajo education less than 38, not a bar, not a casino, not a Hogan. It all began in a car. The kids are restless, tired of being confined to this holding tank and this time it is cold. The dark cloudy mountains calculate early snow from the restless kids, tired of telling jokes, tired of playing eyes spy, tired of tribal radio. Assignment 38. Number one, diagram the separation. Two, write a poem about the language not spoken. Three, rearrange the lines in symbolic order. So before, I was just thinking about just reading that one about the section. So when I was here, I had the great honor to study with Maxing Hon Kingston, who was very influential in my education, as well as Gerald Visner and some of those poems allude to that experience and then kind of walking on campus of seeing the Campanile. So during the time I was here, the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act legislation was signed and that was in 1990. And we had a lot of student discussion and community education and awareness around that. And I think, you know, where I live now in Durango, Colorado, which is in the Four Corners region of the U.S., that bill is very much still, we're still in that process as a society trying to repatriate and return many items. And I know that Berkeley is part of that as well because they also had a huge collections and there were so many rumors around where the remains were housed and a group of Native students, I remember us like at night we would, and I don't know, we thought we were very clever. But we would go around campus and we would like smudge different buildings that we thought had, you know, like remains there or that ghost live there. And just because, you know, we needed that protection as students, right, that really affected I think many people and we're seeing, and people talk about that as an illness and it just kind of reminded me of that when I was reading those passages. This one's called the albatross. Every day he walked into the albatross sitting in a corner booth. He usually waited several minutes before ordering his first drink. The several minutes of decision making always involved the first. A, time he was struck by lightning. B, bite of a North Beach pizza. Three, droplets of sweat mixing into a dance club's pheromones. D, a crisp October walk along the Mesa's rim. Some days the minutes turned into stories he used as reference points to bring him back to his quiet corner booth. His aunt Lita told him once that he was abandoned because he was struck by lightning as an infant. That was the only time his heart skipped a beat. It felt like a kite, a strong desire to fly, not away, or like a whirlwind. His desire was to spread across the planet with a force tumbling, steady as a river. Some days he would replay the dialogue that never made it past his heart like the time he just ate slice after slice of garlic pizza in a North Beach pizzeria. When he should have been using his mouth to ask Lindsay to be his wife. Remember the day we met? I was still so and everything knew different. I never had until you and I wanted, never knew you the rest of my life. I didn't think you, I didn't think it much before I moved here and you. The wedding ring nestled in his pocket all night and on into the laundry day and on into the next laundry day until it was finally lost like all the one sided socks that hung on the laundromat wall. Each month the attendant displayed those lost socks into art, pinned and hung on the southernmost wall. He especially enjoyed the jack-o'-lantern in October. Some days he just sat quietly soaking in the sweat moisture from DJ Kirk threading the loop of everyone on the dance floor. It reminded him of the way his aunt patched his knee-torn jeans. Her crisscross stitches were always done with her gigantic spool of rainbow thread. The needle became a lightning bolt weaving the rainbow's powers into his clothing. On the dance floor the honey-scented steam fastened him to the circle. A venomous nectar entered his pores and incensed his morning coffee. Some days the October chill frosted his words like an empty vending machine. Sometimes he would wait in the cold until he was restocked. He wasn't really sure where his words went compacted into combustible carbonated units or did his words spiral into thin coils of discs neatly bound like masking tape. The sun sprays said, my vibrations connect to your DNA. The Siberian elders chant in their cardboard, twangy, high-pitched whistle singing in their special way communicating with the spirit standing outside. The 61,000 indigenous horse people in Siberia are waiting for our answer. They are carrying an ornamental breastplate covering their exposed heart. The yellow stars gather at the peak of a sacred mountain. The scientists are speaking in theoretical explanations. Your sickness is behind the wall. The ignored history is detailed in the Milky Way's placement. His whimpered question learned the night chance. The enemy way is just a song. Colonization is just another mathematical theory trapped in the late harvesting of dried corn. And that dried corn simmers and stirs in a pot of winter stew months later, years later or just minutes away. And I want to read a few new pieces. One for sure. We were at the conference I mentioned earlier, and it's such a good feeling right now to have a growing body of DNA writers to really kind of develop each other and talk about our writing in a very relational way. I think we don't have to explain things to each other. We sort of just already know what we're talking about. This is part of an epistolary discussion. We're going to start with Jake Skeets and Lucy Topohanso who are both poets. Dear Jake, I have been thinking about the essay I'm writing. There has always been Navajo writers but there has only recently been an interest and how they demonstrate literary sovereignty. I'm going to start with a little bit more detail. I'm going to start with our indigenizing language. Indigenizing the landscape of the page, using the whiteness of the page, the silent burial of the indigenous soundscape. The revival is resuscitating. The indigenity off the page is reordered. Indigenous writers are rematrating the sounds, agency in the shaping of sound. Ha-ha-lay. Ha-ha-ee. Ha-ha-uh. I have been stuck or have I been stuck in my own invisibility? Is my jing sound as ash on my tongue? Ha-ish-uh. Ha-ish. Ha-ish. Dear Lucy, yesterday I became the unaspirated consonant flattening myself into the page, depleting myself of air. I am lucky today, the wind is blowing through my heart. I am a native. Several mile per hour, seven mile per hour, gusts emerging from the northeast. I keep thinking about Safia and her poetry, how she exposed her broken English, how her words break it open. I want to break letters, how she syncs with my unaspirations. She tells me, the landscape is begging me to find new language from it. When I think of her poetry, I want to build a fire. I want to gather wood, found dead wood from fallen trees that snap under slight pressure. I want to gather wood to flame my fire. Dear Jake, of late I have found myself staring deep into the whiteness of the page. I am snow-blind. I am taken back to New Year's Eve, 1999. My family and I were on our way to a pow-wow. I was driving our minivan and it was dark. I was by Cuba rounding the bend. I was suspended. The snow-packed road widened. The wind blew powdery flakes across the road. I lost all sense of direction. I found myself staring deep into the whiteness. Snow-blinded. Inarticulate. I found myself staring deep into the whiteness of the page. I listened for its breath. I tenderly moved my fingers across the whiteness, motioning the flattened spaces to awaken. The first to awaken is the diacritical glottal. What a funny word to represent the restriction of sound. An evocative hold of the throat. A sound of the suspended sound. Jets forward. Sprays across the page. A silent roar, chalking over a white volcanic ash. Landing of restricted sound. Dear Lucy, tonight I am writing a simple sentence in Denebizad. I am home alone with no one to communicate with. No one who will ask. Nishant. Thank you. Thank you, Esther. That was really marvelous. If you want more, Esther's book is being sold by Patrick from Pegasus Books back there, and I highly encourage you to pick it up. Esther will be signing books, so stick around for that. And stick around too for Esther's craft talk at 4 p.m., I believe, in Hearst Annex D23. If you need instructions there, you can come up to me after, or Lori and Beth from Arts Research Center can also help guide you. Our next lunch poems will be on April 4th, I believe, with Brandon Shimoda. Thank you. Thank you. Feel free to sign up for our mailing list on the way out, and you can review this reading as any past readings on YouTube. Thank you all for being with us today.