 Hello, welcome, everyone, to this month's Poem Jam. I'm John Smolley, a librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Center on the third floor of this very library, where most of our poetry books reside in 41 languages. While we're waiting for one or two more people to show up, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a couple programs. On behalf of the Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatush Sholoni, who are the original inhabitants of this San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatush have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatush and by affirming their sovereign rights as First Peoples. I should mention that tonight's program is being filmed for our archives and promotional materials. If you do not wish to be filmed, let me know. Today is a part of the regular Poem Jam series curated by Kim Shuck, which takes place the second Thursday of each month. I want to also let you know that Kim Shuck is an artist and will be having an art exhibit which opens July 22nd, that is called Translations From Here, featuring Kim's beadwork. There will be a sort of grand opening reception and that will be August 3rd, 5 to 7 p.m. So I hope you'll come to that. If you want to learn more about our programs, you can pick up a flyer or library newsletter from the table there. Also there you'll find these lovely limited edition Poem Jam 2023 pins. And there's coffee and cookies, so help yourself to all that. That's all I have to say for announcements. I will now turn the microphone over to Kim Shuck. Please give a warm welcome to Kim. Hey, folks. Thank you for being here. It's fun to see people attend who performed at previous ones and who aren't on the stage tonight, so thank you. It is my opinion that the Beast Crawl is one of the three most important Northern California literary events that happens. And I know that sounds really big, but the reason is that the people who read at that event are at all kinds of levels. And I think that's really important because as we... I'm feeling my age a little bit this week in particular for reasons that we won't go into. But the point of having a community that continues requires that we continue to fill it in with people who might be here longer than us. And it also helps the work grow. And I know there are a lot of people here who, for whom this is not news, but it's really important. Also with the incredible both cultural flexibility that's happening right now played against the rigidity and criminalization of a lot of identities that's taking place at the moment, it is absolutely essential that we continue to expand who is viewed as an art maker in this particular culture, if we want to have a culture. So I'm always really excited by who ends up reading at Beast Crawl. I always go home and write afterwards. And for that reason, I am throwing myself and have thrown myself completely behind this event. It is the most diverse thing I do. I know that word is overused, but it's the most diverse thing that I'm at in a year. And I'm really excited that they're continuing it. And I think, you know, people should attend and participate and where possible donate, but attend and participate for sure. And that is why tonight's reading is a Beast Crawl focused reading. And I'm having a brain cloud right now. I'm going to be referenced, some of you may get. And I have totally spaced your last name, Ryan Nakano. Thank you. Ryan Nakano is here for the first time on my microphone. It is part of the last cohort of the Nomadic Press chat books. And as seems to be true with the way my brain is working these days, I did not remember by name, but I do know the work, and you're about to be in for a treat. Please welcome to the microphone Ryan Nakano. Okay, cool. Thanks so much, Kim, for inviting me to your reading, your space. This is also my first reading in a library and I love libraries. So, yeah, give it up for libraries. Honestly, one of the coolest public spaces that we have. So, yeah, I'm excited to be reading. Yeah, so this is the chat book that Kim was referring to. It's I Am Minor. And this is part of the last cohort of Nomadic. It has transitioned over to Black Lawrence Press, as many of the other Nomadic authors have done as well. So, yeah, I'll maybe read a couple from here and some new stuff. But I'll start with stuff in the book. And also, so I don't completely go over time. I'm going to start a timer for myself. Okay, fantastic. Okay. What to read? Yeah, I will read the first poem from this book. It's called Your Mother's Chocolate Pecan Pie. Yeah, that's all I'll say about that. Your mother's chocolate pecan pie. I ask her how she does what she does. Every year I wait for the dark and delicate, the binding of caro, the mixing of egg, the whites, the yolk. She sends a list, says begin with gathering. If you gather first, you're less likely to forget is how I interpret what is not said but inherited. Proclivity for what is sweet, the blunt tongue, the teeth. Tradition being the act of making the unfamiliar familiar enough. I ask her how she does what she does, to which she replies, I love you. Good luck, which I take to mean. When you spend enough time with something you trust, the memory takes over the body as a host until there is nothing left to measure. Poem. Thanks. Yeah, I picked that up from another poet when I was living in Portland. They would always end their poems with poems so people knew when to like, we were transitioning, so when I do that, that's what's going on. Just a little bit of context. I don't know if it's really relevant, but this was sort of a project, like a thematic project. I read all, or no, I didn't read, but I watched all these films starring Scarlett Johansson, and then I just wrote poems. So I don't know if that helps for spraying these, but that's, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and then I did want to read, I've never read this piece out loud necessarily, but it's apparently World Oceans Day, and so I was trying to find some things that were fitting if I can find it. Oh, okay, here we go. This is called Owner's Manual. It's kind of taken from a scene from one of those films where the character, protagonist, antagonist sees a baby on a beach, just like kind of abandoned, and then, yeah, there's like this weird sort of feeling of are they responsible, and there's like kind of an alienation between the child and this stranger. So, yeah. Owner's Manual. At the edge of the ocean, a small sack of flesh leaks, a sharp siren-like sound against a coastal wind, the kind of sound that makes the blood thick, even when it isn't. Even when a thing without blood curdles, it can't help but comfort. The flesh writhing through receptacles of hard-shelled fruit. Your eyes adjust, not even the sand nor the rock, and yet, something is off. The goals are circling. The arms grow heavy from holding a phantom limb by limb, and the likeness is only an impression left in the wet slope of sand that is your memory. Whose child is this? A sleep amongst the sea and grass, a barnacle, a mollusk, poem. Thank you, thank you. I'll read another one. This is really new. I was writing this on my way here, like the last, I guess, yeah, stanza. So, really new. And again, I was thinking about World Oceans Day, and every time I think about the ocean specifically, I think about Okinawa, where my grandma grew up, and all the kind of like political turmoil there with the US military-based presence, and the environmental kind of damage that does to the ocean and marine diversity there. So, yeah, this is called Ora Bay, which is a very important bio-diverse region where one of the bases is being relocated, so there's a lot of construction happening, and it's, yeah, it's very contentious, to say the least. Ora Bay. How long have you known the sea floor soft? Is the world under water? See Takuya Nakamura, how he calls it planet? Tag, nature, nature, Henako. It's getting hard to tell the fish from the surface, the sand from sun, the ocean from drowning. New image. A castle covered in swimming tomato clownfish set against the aquamarine background of history. At first, the land, now the ocean, now the creek, the river, and streams. You cannot drink without getting sick from every false fire, alarm, pretense. In the city, the colony becomes combat ready, its teeth sinking into the sea, an enemy, anemone, mountain of life, thousands of years in the making, unmade from sea change to sea change to sea change. A rare blue coral peaks beneath a shadow. The glass bottom of a boat breaks. Under the weight of bare feet, all the red becomes real. The ocean no longer a thing between us as if a border. Arterial motives escape, red as in blood, the heart, the dugong dugon gone nowhere. They say if you put a large shell to your ear, you can hear a wave crashing outside a gate. That's your home calling itself home, your body floating in rhythm. From the bay to the bay, your lungs search for grains of salt, sand. Poem. Thank you. Definitely don't have time to read this whole suite, but this is a suite of poems that I wrote for an anthology submission around Japanese American incarceration during World War II. I'll read maybe two. We'll see how many I can get through. Chapter one, stolen. They took my car and now they wonder why I hunt. Laughing. The man cuts open a rattlesnake. This isn't hunting, he says. Hunting is what they did after sinking their teeth into our skin. His daughter peels back a floorboard to reveal a snake pit under the barracks. We're making medicine by studying its venom. We think the blood might thicken. We think if we gather enough of them and run experiments we might self-determine. A field mouse seeking shelter from the desert falls into the opening made by the woman. Its cheeks full of grass seed soften under a slow release of hemotoxin. Sister scribbles a single word into her notebook. Why? I'm gardening, says the woman. A stream of snakes take turns leaving, slow releasing seeds back into the earth's surface. Two boys come in from outside, their eyes swirling gas giants. Papa, the dust never settled. Did you try blinking? We can't. We've lost our eyelids. Poem. Okay, let's see. How do I want to do this? Sure. Yeah, I'll just jump right into the next chapter. Chapter two, our possessions. The first possession I was told was a train car full of rice. As soon as the ship sank, the prophet predicted scarceness and began the process of possessing a pearlescent mountain. At the station, the train quickly became a serpent, swallowing the prophet with beetles for eyes. How quickly the beetles descended on the prophet. Possessed, the beetles watched the prophet vanish. Possessed, they froze his assets. By the time the serpent turned back into a train, land, houses, and businesses had also become possessed. Furniture, appliances, temples, churches possessed. There were, of course, neighbors and friends who watched over the objects in possession. Those like Al Carlson, who must have seen the spirit in them. Everything else, monsters and men. When the train left, so too the prophet. A man outside his own body is a man possessed, his eyes at the back of his head. The last possession occurred the moment I searched your name. Tsuna Watanabe, they say, slayed a demon at Rashomon Gate. The Oni Ibaraki Doji lost an arm to his blade, and you possessed his name. Behind a gate, you penned a letter to a serpent in the state replied by licking blood from its fingertips. Your son, an arm you kept close to your chest, was serving, and you wondered what purpose was served by the fence. Under a committee of 68, I found a man floating above your description. Below the apparition, the caption read, Secretary of War, Stimson. I knew then you were possessed. Somehow over the course of history, your face became white, your smile crooked, one eye sliding desperately to the side, followed closely by secret service. I knew then history was possessed. Image of the Gadsden flag as partition. How many snakes did you step past before crossing the body of a man made ghost in the desert? How many dogs abandoned before loyalty becomes a question? Of course you wanted to leave. Leaving is not the question, and you knew that. The question is, what possessed the sentry to make an exit from his flesh? Poem. All right, I'm going to quickly read this one, and I'll be right in time. Yeah, this is chapter four of that suite. For one of the horses is my grandmother. Out there with all the other horses who are said to be free, galloping across house and confusion in the valley. I watched her for a while, her silver mane brushing against sage, wild Mustang, far away from Delta, close enough to catch flies above her eyelids. American lead us to water, cover a great plane, past a slow moving train said to be a snake. I read somewhere it's common to inject venom into a horse to harvest antibodies for future bite victims. I don't know if it's true. There are so many stories, they all begin to bleed into one another, like titles crashing. Poem. Thanks again. I have so many responses to that. We should talk. Our next reader is an incredible host of her own open mic and gives the best hugs in the bay area and is a good friend with her own book, which is now unobtainium as far as I understand it until they reprint something. Please welcome to the microphone, Nazila James. I feel like Ryan set a precedent with this mic in the middle of the floor thing, so I'm just going to do that. I'm also going to time myself because I'm hosting the open mic right after this because doing too much is what I do. We'll just keep on doing that. I wasn't really sure what to read tonight. All of this is new, unshared work. I do a few times a year. It happens all year. It's a monthly 30 and 30 called The Grind. Sometimes I get to the end. This time I didn't, but I wrote a bunch of poems and so all of these are from The Grind. I'm not classy. I read from my phone. Okay, so I'm going to read a bunch of new ones and if I have time I'll read an old one. This is called Callie Love. I chose to come to California big and bold and full of everything. I left my fate to palm trees, palm and redwood trees, whatever way the bay winds blow. Every day I wake up glad, always three hours earlier, still thrilled, dash out the door to eagerly greet the beaming sun or drenching rains, but never do I soak up regret. Tomorrow I will work, wash my hair or do laundry. I will hope and ponder, love and be loved, whatever happens. I am in my favorite state of mind of being and in this country. All of my future is contained in the vessel of here. This one's actually a little bit older. I wrote this a couple of years ago. This is a breakup poem to a situation ship. It's called Apocalypse. And so I walk around this world where anything could happen and I think of you. Car crashes and police brutality, terrorists and mass shootings and my phone would never ring because I was never really in your life. Just a cunning side distraction, a secret fetish, pizza and Netflix at midnight, rest stop on a rarely traveled highway. No one you know would think to invite me to the hospital or the funeral home. I am a figment of your imagination, shadow of a waking dream. And so I keep walking. If anything happened you would be oblivious. I'd be just another dead zombie rotting on a forgotten road. Anyone I know would never think to call you to witness my execution or ascension because you were never in my real life. Just a figment of my imagination, like Batman or world peace, disco dancing in my peripheral ghost riding down my street. So if this life someday blows up in either of our faces with car chases or nuclear holocaust or million dollar lottery wins, know now that I loved you forever. Ride or die friend till the end, all the way until I disappeared from existence and you never heard from me again. So this is random. This is not about an actual situation because I don't know why I'd be writing stuff. So this is called stunning. She is stunning. They are not jealous in a vacuum. He is a wretched fool in a shiny patterned dress shirt. She walks ahead, hands unheld. The double take bartender knows her. Amber liquid is poured over frigid crystals. A hush falls on the crowded bar. It is in your own ears as she does not fail to notice you and your electric smile before her current owner snatches back her attention and you choose your destiny and a battle for love. Since we're writing delusional shit, this is called the new math. This is a math manifestation. This didn't happen either. He far exceeds the sum of his parts. Heart plus body plus mind plus God. The math is too new to quantify him. He is infinite as the universe. My favorite number is eight. He looks at me sideways and won't understand why I can't stop laughing. I met him on a Sunday lying beneath the sun's outstretched arms listening to the song of the wind and melodic clouds drizzling by. He was a tall, refreshingly cool glass of chocolate soda, more like an egg cream, almost an ice cream float, but he was sweeter and not so cold. He had the same tomorrow in his eyes that he has now, like I could just follow him forever, like he would lead me to peaceful places, like our journey would never have to end. And I do, and he has, and here we are. Traveling together on this perpetual field trip deep in this vacation love, turns out me plus him is heaven, is solace, is the sum and the remainder, is the solution to X, is home. And for me, everything is finally adding up. So this is something that actually did happen in Missouri. A very old, probably racist white man shot a young black boy for ringing his doorbell. And I wrote this. This is called Tuesday Morning. Good morning. It's Tuesday. Another black girl went missing last night. Did you notice? Did you feel the sudden vacuum where divinity used to be? No. The news tends to ignore the uncelebrated, the unworshipped in the background. I myself travel alone at night a lot. I walk really fast and stay in view of street lights a lot. I stay away from empty parking lots. I already merely exist as a series of unnamed statistics. I'd rather be a shadow than a ghost. Another black boy got shot yesterday. Not to be confused with the other black boy who got shot yesterday or the other black boy who got shot last night and last week and last month and day after tomorrow and next Thursday afternoon. Not to say that every day another black boy gets shot. Just to say that somebody should change the narrative. That is to say, we only hear about what is considered newsworthy. Knowing cares of black people kill each other. But black boys are also getting picked off by a succession of scared white men. Seems they fear most for their lives when they are the only one holding a gun. It is mid-afternoon on a weekday. It is an understatement to say that I feel hunted. I am surrounded by apex predators today. I act nonchalant and pleasantly stoic. When I say no to the stranger demanding my phone number, will he stab me in the face? If a white man brings a gun to the school that I work at, will I have time to run away? Any minute, my next appearance could be on a missing poster or a memorial mural or in a say her name hashtag. It won't be newsworthy. It will not be noteworthy. It will just be Wednesday. This is called the missing. I get lost in unintentional silences, overwhelmed into dysfunction by the rigid immobility of it all. Catch a firefly. Write your name on the cold hardness of my yesterday. See how insignificant it is when hot, salty rain washes your memory smooth as a summer beach. Still heady from the aroma of this morning's coffee and last night's orange peels. I want to but cannot call it hatred. Thought it would dissipate once I discarded all the mementos from your Puerto Rico trip. I wrote and burned you, disimagined and unmade nostalgia. You ghosted but still haunt me, despite prayers and exorcisms. So am I caught up in cluttered, empty rooms, sitting for too long in parked cars, stale in a casket of my own loneliness, learning to live with the dead. I have upbeat shit. Don't look at me like that. This is called the yum. We are all a snack to someone hungry. You don't always know who's mentally licking their lips as you obliviously walk on by. So many of us so lonely inside our very tempting packaging. You are somebody's tasty treat. They're yummy num-nums. They're cool, refreshing drink. Hold out for love, for comfort and home cooked, for something substantial to come along so you can break your fast. Know your own deliciousness. You are a future favorite taste and you will get your just desserts as well. So since I feel like I should do one more because those are pretty short. This is a love poem to all of y'all. This is called amazing. I will not tell you that you are amazing because your humility would see me as crazy, would hear me as overdoing it, would think of it as idol worship. You wouldn't believe that I can feel your goodness radiating at me from miles away. You see yourself where you are, where you have come to. I see footsteps trailing far behind you, in front of the stories you have told me, across and over the mountains you have shown me, at your back, while you face the sun and the wind and the glorious future. The light in my eyes that you admire is your reflection. Would you even believe me if I told you you are magnificent, extraordinary, breathtaking because I forget to breathe sometimes in your presence because my eyes water from your luminosity and I don't know you. Also, I do not know well the ocean or the galaxy or how miracles work. However, neither they nor you are any less for my lack of knowledge, nor do you need me to tell you anything about your amazing self for you to just be. Thank you. Honestly, you should go to that open mic. It's very good. And our next reader, I met our next reader a long time ago, trying to think of the date, but I can't. Don't don't. It's been years. And did we? Oh, because I thought we met at the reading down on Balancia Street. But you're right. I think you're right. I visibly forgot somebody's name standing in this microphone not not half an hour ago. So you have nothing to prove to me. But we were doing a reading as a benefit when you moved back to San Francisco in company with Sarah B. Yeah. And it was really incredible. It really was. And I've been glad every time I've gotten to hear you read since then, it's makes me happy every time. And is it poems for teeth? Yeah, that was the first book of yours that I had and it still has pride of place on the bookshelf amongst, you know, all of the books I get given these days. That one is important to me. So please prepare to be dazzled by Richard Lawrence here. Beast crawl and stuff like Kim mentioned. I don't think you mentioned, but I am pretty spacey. Should I be close to the mic? I guess I should be that Ryan and Naz are this year on the organizing team for beast crawl, which I'm not and never have been. I organized other festivals. So I know it's a fuck of a lot of work. I just wanted to say thank you for that. I've just done millions of things for beast crawl. This year I'll be hosting a reading called hashtag we, which is based on a queer series that I ran a few years ago. Natasha spoke at it in which where writers of all different sorts would give a talk about marginalization they'd experienced both within and without the queer community and would read their work. There'll be Denner Rod, Julian Mithra, Kellyanne Parker, and Tom Odegaard who will speak on intersex, which you don't hear much about. Okay, this really happened. This year I haven't written as much poetry as I guess you call it flash memoir, but I prefer to think of it as shit I got into. Is there anyone here does not know what a bike messenger is or was because I met someone recently who didn't. They were younger than I. But this happened steps away from where we are a long time ago. The week I was a shoplifter. This is the story of the week I was a shoplifter. It was the second week of February 1985 and professionally I was a bike messenger in San Francisco and not a shoplifter per se. I was riding my bike down Market Street early Monday morning on my way to the Arrow delivery hub on Stewart Street and found myself swerving onto the sidewalk at Powell and up to the giant old Woolworth store on the corner. I see some people nodding, so some of you remember. I'd heard it was the biggest Woolworths in the world, which it was, and I'd never been inside and it was calling to me. As I was locking up my bike, I decided to go in and shoplift one item. I had no idea what that would be. I had never shoplifted before. That's also true. And I had absolutely no idea where the impulse came from. I have no explanation to this day. I strode in as if on a mission and made a beeline down a couple of aisles without even pausing or looking at things, found the stairs to the basement that I didn't know were there. And apparently, what was apparently what I needed, where I needed to be, down I went without a thought, dashed into the sewing aisle and stopped short. The sewing aisle. I was barely 24 and not much of a seamstress, but I wasn't standing there looking at the red directly in front of me hung an enticing row of glitter packets in various colors. Gotta love those shiny things. I grabbed a packet of the red glitter and walked right up and out of the store. No one seemed to notice me at all. I went about my work day, as usual, careening from one office to another to another in and out of all kinds of buildings, hallways, elevators, and everywhere I went, I sprinkled a little red glitter. How pretty. As each receptionist signed for the delivery, I asked if they'd like a small pile of glitter on the corner of their desk. Most everyone said yes. Within an hour or two, I found myself taking a detour back to the Woolworths to grab the rest of the red glitter. This time, when I walked in, I noticed a lovely display of $1 nail polish. Remember that? In many delightful colors. So on my way out, I bought a bottle to cover my tracks and add to my collection, which I still have. By the end of the day, all the red glitter was gone, stealthily sprinkled about the town. The next morning, I stopped by Woolworths on my way to work and lifted all the packets of gold glitter, purchasing a couple more bottles of nail polish as I left. That day took me to some of the same buildings, elevators, hallways, receptionists, and lots of new ones as well. My repeat glitteries were on the hold, delighted. Wednesday was the green, and I made sure to wear a few of the new nail colors to show the Woolworths when I bought more. By then, I was starting to notice the glitter in buildings and offices I hadn't been in, even in a couple of downtown convenience stores, as well as on packages being handed to me and those carried by other messengers on the messengers themselves, and even on a few business suits. This stuff was getting around. Thursday was Valentine's Day, and I rude my lack of foresight for having stolen all the red glitter on Monday. Purple would have to do. By Friday, the only packs of glitter left were the multicolored, or, if you will, rainbow, a perfect ending for the week. I left those four Lorne hooks bare when I dashed out of the place with 10 different color nails, a few more bottles for my palette, and a nice cache of rainbows ready to sprinkle. It turned out that Friday and that week ended with a particularly wild run. Late afternoon, Arrow sent me to pick up a heavy fragile box from an engraver in the Tenderloin. It barely fit in my bike basket and was a rush to the mayor's office in City Hall, maybe eight blocks or so west of there. But instead of having me hoof it to the hall, they sent me inexplicably back downtown, up past North Beach to Levi's Plaza, way round at Deeridelly Square by Fisherman's Wharf, and plop down at Fort Mason on the north end of town. Suffice it to say, this was an hour run at top speed in a giant circle around San Francisco's northeast quadrant, leaving me to grind up and over the Van Ness Hill to deliver one of the least expeditious rushes I can recall. It made no sense at all, but what does? At least the end of the ride was a long glide down. Sweaty and bedraggled, I dashed into the mayor's office only to be lectured by her assistant who let me know in no uncertain terms that Mayor Diane Feinstein was late for a plane and waiting very impatiently to take this very box which contained a commemorative plaque to London to give directly to Queen Elizabeth II. This is true. In all the kerfuffle, I doubt anyone noticed the smears of rainbow glitter all over the package. As I left the office, I surreptitiously dumped the rest of the glitter, about half a pack in total, in a trail across the thick shag carpet where it would be harbored and transported on the soles of outbound shoes forever hence. This is the story of the week that I glittered the city of San Francisco and the Queen of England. Shit I got into. Wow, I should be, could you even hear me? Yeah. I have two more things, is that okay? Okay. This one is a couple minutes and the last one is short. I'll read one from my last book which came out from Collapse Press. The first book from Collapse Press, it's Paul Corman-Roberts Press Fall Before Last called Unit of Agency. I'll be reading for them during Beast Crawl. This one was written during sheltering. It's called The View from My Apartment, where I was by myself for 15 months. It's got four parts and I don't do the numbers so I'll just give you fingers or something. The View from My Apartment. I stand, I look out my window at the sad world and realize that it's not sad at all. I am. People are. But the world is not. This is something that I learn every day and forget every day. It's all part of the story that we tell ourselves over and over in our sleep. It's the story of how sadness fell in love with the world and what happened next. How all the trees lost their leaves one day and the world shrugged it off while sadness spent all winter knitting them scarves. Of how we forget again and again because we aren't real. We are the dream. We fade and of who comes along and falls in love with the dream. And what happens next? I look at my screen and the pixels become needles that slash through my retinas with animate force. Inside my brain, they build a new colony of glass-like obelisks in a prismatic maze. I stagger through, dagger and slice until I find a cold cement corner to rest in. I curl up there shivering until the disorientation settles and I become comfortable. Now I feel ready for anything. I climb the sleek razors out from the screen and look at the world that's always held danger and salvos and glee, even as primordial seas indifferently bash cliffs to clay. Or are they indifferent? Are they any different than the hawking legions stampeding their screens with fear of the flesh sharpening them into blades? I look at the news and see capitalism eating itself from the inside, preparing to sacrifice humanity to save its cankered hide, the opening credits of metropolis roll. As the bunkered wealthy gorged on ecstasy and brie, barter slaves survival for their roast pork. Armies marched down our streets shooting everyone for fun. I learned that there's no immunity to bullets. The song of power saws wearing everywhere melds in my dreams with crashing cars and the roar of whole cities on fire. I wake to find I haven't woken. I sleep hungry and waiting for the tanks to deliver old bread and momentary stimulus. After that, I lie back down in the dark, unsure of whether my labored breathing is the result of panic or a virus the size of a fat politician sitting on my chest. I grab my phone, see it still has 17% and wonder if I should reach out to someone. Instead, I look at the news. Oh, this one has the word Samara. Those little seeds that helicopter through the air. That's a pretty word. I look in the mirror. This is the last section of this. I look in the mirror and see the eyes I've always had. Same eyes, same size, maybe a little more blurry and bloodshot, but mine, whatever that means. I see my face, whatever that means. Maybe the face that others see and maybe not. Who can tell? I suspect that the mirror holds my face at every age and I see them all at once. Unable to separate the stony edifice that the flower lady sees or the one that the checkout guy sees are all the infinite others and I see my infinity beyond skin. The spaceless force that lives us all, all at once and endless as the duck's eye of eternity. Of course we are inside each other. Please don't be afraid as rain falls and the roots drink. I rejoice from stem and leaf for we are all wonder. We are all embraced. We are all of every age into the grave, into the soil, into the flesh, into our ancestors sailing like samaras, into the wind, into the solar stream. The view from my apartment. This is, I have a new book coming out in the fall which I haven't really announced yet from a place in New York and it's called Mammal. And yeah, this is a piece from it. There was something else I was going to say, but I don't know what. I don't know what. Oh, if you'd like the little memoir thing, I have a piece coming out in the 14 Hills. It's about to be released. It's their summer issue in the punk section that's about the beginnings of the homo core movement, the queer punk movement in the late 80s. If you stumble across issue 29, I just wanted to mention. Okay, so I'll read this one. My pronouns are he, they, I only mentioned that because no one seems to ask people over 40, but he is fine. I'm used to it really. I'm not binary, but who is? Okay. First person singular pronouns are key and many doors are opening. Gender might not be the only point of reference prone to dissolution. So much dissolves eventually when you think of it. Ice cream, salt, granite, marriages, nations, civility, ideals to name a few. Names themselves dissolve after a while as do their bearers. Tongues become less agile and mute the mortified mouth. Our teeth dissolve in sand. Our cells dissolve inside us. We slide like pudding into history, into time, itself dissolving as the synapses that market forget themselves, forget the body, forget the first person singular in frank denial that there was a first, a first person slung from an umbilicus, a thousand millennia long. That's one long ass cord swinging, pendulous in a glistening sack sliding on plasma charged by molecules spun to helix by a hydrogen globe. All dissolving as it moves, splitting cells and singing. Pronoun that why don't you? I've a but don't worry yourself or whatever self or or selves you think you have too much. The words are less important than the being which is itself a word seeping through our filters as we come upon a sea and fall in love with it calling every drop of water by its name. Namaste. I love you. I love you too. Checking once again to make sure that the details of life as I thought they were have continued. And that is the case, apart from the fact that my father has for some reason called me in the middle of a poetry reading. I do. I was going to find it again, except the part that's relevant about my father calling me is that it took it off the page online that I was on with my phone. So I had to say a couple of things. I'm going to read this. Some people me who've seen this online. It's called the shrouds and spells of June. You're not responsible for the things your family doesn't understand. A fear. Massaged into your muscles reinforced in the headlines that justify your murder. The humans of every gender that couldn't contain self any longer in any available skin through bricks, bricks and words. They continue to save us all sketched and vanished, decoded, betrayed. But the potential story, the eventual story, the inevitable safety. There's no other option. Each writing our bricks very carefully and throwing them as hard as we can. And I decided to read that for you, Richard. I too go off on things should I get into. That are not poems. And I'm going to read you one. And it's called legend. Not everyone can do a web search and find pictures of the dead body of a relative displayed on a door. And that's probably a good thing. I never knew Ned Christie. He was my great grandmother's cousin. I didn't know my great-grandma. I knew her, loved her. She made amazing biscuits, was related to a Cherokee judge, ran shine during prohibition. If I wrote her life, no one would believe half of it. And I'm not sure that I believe it either. She has become my mythological ancestor. And she connects me to a different period in Cherokee history and some legendary figures, but once she was a wonderful playmate. You may not have heard of Ned Christie. Idle wanderings through web mulch may not help. My close family never talked about him by name. Later, I worked out that some of grandma's stories were about him. The stories weren't angles as if we would break his memory by looking directly at it. There are family memories that have to be taken carefully. Grandma and I tease the dog, throwing a ball back and forth. The ball rides short arcs from couch to the good chair, couch to the good chair, delighted Puff indulging us. The dog runs between panting. We don't speak. The love between us is settled, thick layers that can only be seen in our eyes. A fellow activist sits at my kitchen table years later. I can't remember how Ned Christie came up. She asks me, what did he look like? So I did a web search. He stands armed and very dark in the scandal time photo. He sits long haired hat on knee next to another man. He looks deep into the camera. Clean shaven, looking like my son when he was younger, looking very familiar. Old lessons bite deep. I look at the images some I've never seen. I look like at them like I'm unwrapping fragile heirloom glass. You have his eyes. I do. I'm fatter, lighter skinned years and miles away from him. But yes, I have his eyes. We take a walk to cow pond where some kids are fishing. One struggles a bit with the catfish. Grandma praises his catfish. I can't remember who the boy was. We watch them fish. You have to be taught to watch fishing. It's not unlike looking at paintings in a museum. The patience, the nuance. Grandma, bad leg and all stands and watches and finally she holds out her hand and the boy hands her the fish. With a magician's gesture, she removes the hook and hands it back. There are plenty of people with a closer connection to Christie. The generations between thin the threads, so many fictions about him, so many books, it's difficult to do justice to the parts that remain. It's clear there was little enough justice then. A search for his image calls up book covers, photos from news articles, drawings, an unrelated video game image makes an appearance. Our dead become raw material. They're remade into all kinds of things, excuses, justifications and dignations. Over and over I see the word outlaw. Grandma tells me a story of an unnamed relative who needed bail because he was wrongly accused of murder. There's a long pause. She tells me about unnamed ancestors who served on the Cherokee Council. She tells me the secret of her biscuits. We sit quietly together for a while. She hands me a craft magazine with a pattern for a tatted lace heart and I pull out my shuttle, shiny pink plastic and examine the instructions. My friend, fellow poet, fellow activist and I scan the images of Ned Christie. She points to one. Is he dead in that one? Who was? He was dead, leaned against a door, posed with guns and still looking like my son. Some websites say that his name was Edward, like my son, like my father. Some of us know his real name. In another image he's there on the door with a group of white men all around him looking very pleased with themselves. If you can imagine a photo of a hunting party sitting around a dead lion, a dead elephant, around some impressive exotic thing that's difficult to kill, there is a small splinter of broken glass stuck in the arch of my foot. Sometimes I pick at it trying to get it out. One of these days, after a long hot soak in the bath, I may be free of it. I must not have been careful enough with some fragile thing. Thank you so much for being here. It is my privilege and delight to put these on. I believe next time as the Pundulse poets, if I'm not mistaken, John is giving me a thumbs up, so I'm not wrong, which is good and that will be next month and should be spectacular judging from the anthology that we are celebrating with that reading. Again, thank you all for being here and attend Beast Crawl. Talk to you soon.