Kim Shuck's Poem Jam Celebrates For the Duration at the San Francisco Public Library

Welcome to this month's poem jam. I'm John Smallley, a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. Thank you with the humanities department. Uh before we get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community. On behalf of the San Francisco Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramatural who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land in accordance with their traditions, the Ramachur have never seated, 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 homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramos and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. In case uh anyone doesn't know, uh the poem jam poetry reading series takes place on the second Thursday of each month here in this very room at 6 pm. Um you can find out more about our program. So I'll just say we hope to see you again next month, September 10th, where poem Jam will be celebrating the afro surrealist poet Khalifa Mitchell. So please do come back next month. You can find out more about our programs by picking up a flyer or newsletter from the uh table on your right where you will also find coffee and cookies and a special limited edition of the poem jam pin. We have a few more of these. Um what else? That's about all that's there. You can also check our online events calendar at sfpl.org. So that's all I have to say by way of introduction. Uh, next I'd like to invite up to the microphone the host of our longrunning poem jam series, San Francisco poet Lauret Ammerida Kim Shuck. Please give a warm welcome to Kim. Uh, we're celebrating Heather Flesher's latest book as you can see for the duration. And uh I'll do a big folder all about Heather when I invite her up to read. But we also have three other spectacular poets supporting this book party. And I cannot tell you how excited I am for that. The first of whom is Colleen McGee, whose work I have absolutely admired for a long time. I'm delighted. Um, whenever we run into each other at readings, I'm thrilled when I actually see a reading coming up that I can attend where I'm not scheduled to do some other bit of nonsense and uh things that keep me from listening to the poetry I want to hear. So, I'd love to have you all please welcome up to the microphone Colleen McKe. Oh, whose book Whose book is uh available for purchase tonight should that be a thing you need and you probably do in here for your patience. Hi. Oh, thank you. Okay, thank you for telling me. After all these years, everybody's still better with microphones than I am. Um, so super honored to be here. Beautiful library reading in such amazing company. Um, Heather was in my fairy tale folklore and feminism class. Was such a pleasure to have her. Um, I'm not taking credit for the fact that she's super brilliant and amazing. She was already amazing before that, but um, she made the class uh, just that much more of a wonderful experience. And of course, I'm in good company reading with Cassandra and Lauren and Kim. What a what a dream lineup here. Um I am going to start by reading something from this experimental poetry and art newspaper which is free and later there will be more free copies there that you can just grab one called the Sphinx. Um, so this is called um this is a creative non-fiction because it may sound stranger than fiction, but I am a mixed race Jewish hillbilly. And so it's kind of about that. I know it SOUNDS LIKE A JOKE, BUT it's actually true. But it's also kind of a joke. Um, this is called a coyote without shadows, without howls. The rocks where my grandma and I used to sit by the Marramck River were full of tiny holes. Lizards and roly polies scured in and out. Grandma Barbara and I would sit and watch the sunset, the splashing of this or that, unseen fish or snake in the water, the rocks cleaving the water beneath the surface, the Queen Anslay bending into the water. Grandma would hold my hand and ask me how many colors I could see in the sunset. She was an art teacher. I enjoyed her quizzes. I always passed them literally with flying colors. As I grew older, pink, red, yellow became periwinkle, lavender, cornflour, blue. My list always answered with, "What else Namala? What other colors do you see?" There were always more to see. I was 12 and my father tore us away to the suburbs where we were to pretend to be gentile white people. An assignment I failed miserably, an assignment I never attempted. Instead, I cut classes during the day and wandered around the suburbs at night. If I squinted, the street light shining through the oak leaves, the emerald phosphorescent glow could seem a bit like stars peeking through the woods. Nothing could dilute my grief at being torn from the Marramck River, jade green and skimmed by but dragonflies, glazed with ice and shored with snow. My skills as an Ozark's girl included knowing when it was going to rain by the movement of the oak leaves, how to gently scoop a black snake from a canoe and lower it gently yet swiftly black back into brown water. How to identify constellations invisible outside the woods. How to pick out a woodpecker's tap from the sounds of other birds. How to tell how far away a coyote was from the house at dusk. How to respect snakes without being bitten by one. The answer is respect their homes. How to spot quicksand, poison ivy, a stagnant pond where no fish would bite. How to spot shakeweed growing in the woods. That's a Missouri thing. That's wild marijuana, but a very poor quality. Um, how to fry a green tomato. How to answer the question, "Who are you?" In the country, it was Chopper's niece. In the country, it was Mr. McKe's granddaughter. In the suburbs, I was surprised by the question, "What are you?" I tried responding with human, but this satisfied no one. No, I mean, what are you? My tan skin was the shade of fallen oak leaves, coyote fur, quick sand. My neighbors were pink in the winter and red in the summer. My skin required an explanation. The answer required was, "I am not black. I am not mixed. I am white. I am Catholic. I am straight. I am from here." I stopped speaking even when spoken to, especially when spoken to. I frightened people with my silence because their questions frightened me. In the country, I could be whoever I needed to be because I was Chopper's niece, Mr. McKe's granddaughter, Mrs. McKe's granddaughter. Those were my names, and they suited me. Outside the country, I was no one. I came with no land, no line, no protectors, and no answers, as I did not know who I was apart from the woods. I did not know how to wake up without a rooster outside my window. I did not know how to find peace without sitting by the banks of a river. So, I wandered around the weirdly flat suburbs for hours, walking in circles. I did not know how to sleep without the calls of coyotes and owls, without a window full of constellations cradled in the branches of the dog woods glittering through black walnut, hickory, pine. I've been writing a lot lately about my failure to adjust. I don't know. Have I adjusted yet? I don't know. This book is called Feeding Ghosts and it is about the publisher, editor, poet, musician, beautiful pain in the ass, best friend Jada Salvo. Um, and um, and it's also about Oakland and uh, it's about a friendship. Um, so I'm going to read tonight the the title piece called Feeding Ghosts. The um epigraph for this book is uh we feed ghosts when we think of them which is a line by um Dennis Ray Powell Jr. and Paul knows uh from a band called the ghostal service which I still think is one of the greatest names for a band ever. Um so this is the title piece called Feeding Ghosts and it's in sections and don't look for it to be linear because it isn't really. feeding ghosts. One nights on the porch in Missouri, lemonade and the humid darkness, idle talk, my mother's voice, and the sudden kamicazi buzz of hundreds of June bugs hurling themselves at our screen door. The porch light bouncing off my cheek, entangling themselves in my hair, moshing toward the light, failing horribly. Exoskeletons scuttling on the porch. how they'd lie there, some legs jittering, the other half of the body still. I'd hover over them, a nervous child, wondering, "Had they killed themselves just to break into our trailer? Why?" It didn't look like they tried to eat anything inside. They just stagger around on our lenolium floor. I read today that scientists do not know why moths and some beetles dive into light. They used to think the light waves and candles reminded male insects of sexy female bug pherommones, but they're not so similar. Scientists also believe moths and beetles were attracted to little lights, confusing them with the moon, that they were using the moon to circumn this lonely planet. But insects don't follow the moon. It turns out all theories have been disproved and now we have no theory. Two. All I have are ghosts stage diving my heart, photobombing my dreams, assigning themselves leading roles. In this dream, you eat my jewelry. A hungry ghost popping glass besing them whole. In this one, and hundreds like it, you sit in my bed and hold my hand and talk to me all night. So happy just to be talking to me. In this one, you kiss me slowly again, the way you always kissed me. In this dream, you show up at my job and give away sandwiches from Wexler's Deli to my homeless students. Karn beef on rye, my favorite. You say, "You take one, too." In this dream, you refuse to take care of our six-year-old daughter. I am livid and surprised to wake up without a daughter or you. In this dream, you hold my hands in a bar with red lights and cut my fingers with a knife. I let you in this dream and dozens like it. Night after night, you visit my beautiful corner, the altar on my dresser. That's a Russian thing, the beautiful corner. The beeswax candles I lit for you. You cup your big swollen tattooed hands around the candles and look at them. You don't speak to me. You don't even look at me. But I know you're glad I lit the candles for you. They feed you. I watch you from my bed, the bed we shared. You're still the tall, handsome safari in your long black jacket and baggy black pants. Something like a smile as you surround the flame with your hands. I know the light has brought you two. I feel like those June bugs back home hurling themselves at the house at night. If they got inside, they wanted out. I never knew if they had bad aim or if they were just throwing themselves around without direction, pure broken impulse. Were they nihilists or just defective creatures? Do they succeed at anything? Or is their whole life shooting arrows in the dark? The arrows being them, the darkness being them. I am a June bug, [ __ ] in grief, aiming myself in the general direction of what might be a door. Four. Some say if you see a moth, it's a ghost visiting. My family was popular with ghosts. A great brown tummulus cloud of them, a force of spiritual weather would cluster at our naked yellow porch light in the woods. Oak brown and bark gray, silven shimmer, carefully folding and unfolding themselves, hesitant prayers, habitually rereading the books of themselves. They'd hover like astronauts trying to pick out a place for themselves on this fluorescent overcrowded moon. My grandma, a kind insomniac, read and sketched all night under the kitchen light bulb, encased in a glass littered with mods, dead, alive, dancing on the dead, desperate to launch themselves back into the light. Grandma, too, was preoccupied with ghosts. She painted them, wrote them, and they remembered her. and dreams that would help her find things like her Passover plate, which great grandma Rose pointed out, scolding in Yiddish, was somehow buried under a pile of old sheets in my teenage uncle's bedroom. My dreams, too, have been riddled with ghosts night after night. They lead me by the hand into disordered places. My greatgrandparents feed me lemonade and cake in the sun. One dead lover takes me to bed just to hold my hand and talk, mainly about books. A few dead friends show me around an underground bar lit with red lights and broken glass. This, they explain, is where they live now. I shouldn't be afraid here. They tell me there is enough light. Five. Why do we light candles? To draw the dead to us like mods. Light the match and watch them spin again. One creature drowning in the honey of another. In the asht sticky mess of my heart, ghosts are stuck like insects in amber. No, ghosts swim out and flit in again. They're the strong ones, the free ones. I'm the one who stays. Six. Some say moths are ghosts visiting, speaking the almost silent language of the dead. Their wings are pulpy paper, faintly marked with obscure script. They stand inches from you for hours, opening and closing their tiny, tenuous wings. Do we read the language of the lepodopter? Do we only worry about our wool sweaters? It's a small price to feed the dead. Seven. Once my phone wasn't working, hadn't for days. Just a gray flat and plackable surface. One afternoon on the train in the tunnel under the bay, I pried it open carefully, removed the square battery. A moth flew out. What did she think? Hovering over the aisle of the train underwater. I put the phone back together. It worked. But I worried about the moth. Would she see the sun again? Would she need the moon? Or just light swishing by in darkness underwater? Thanks y'all. Thank you, Colleen. Our next reader is um Lauren Parker, who I think I met Have I met all of these people through you, Paul? For those who don't know, Paul Corman Roberts is actually one of the major nexuses of poetry in in the world. And we have to just learn to accept and appreciate that because it's the real deal. Um, Lauren is uh oh, magical, remarkable, delightful, and uh about to read for you. Please welcome her up to the book. I'm going to do this from the standing mic if that's okay. Hello everyone. I'm so thrilled to be here on this incredible lineup. Um, I'm going to read a couple poems from a couple different things. And so last year I published a book of poems that are all about science fiction and David Bowie and being gender queer and sleeping with women who are better than you in the desert. Um, and uh, and this is one of those poems. Organic ripe fruit grown here. It's the sign as large as a two-story house in the shape of a talking strawberry. The seeds cut into flat red flesh holes to let the wind through the stand as avocados and pimmens. I a finally asked why you came with me to find a man who no longer exists and who might never have been at all. A dyke with a quick tongue and an old suit in an old car with a torn up route. We are following the dregs of a man who swore up and down he was there when he wasn't. Spectre hands, echo voice, a fog a long way out. But when you call me priest in the night, I feel the ridges and rods of alien want. I am better than queen, better than king. I hold the magic that makes you mine. You descend the steps of the grimy hotel we've spent four days in. your dress stained and collar yellowed and still you look like you're hopping into a limo with someone far better than me. And I'd kill any man who thought he had done the work to earn you. I have memorized this hotel room, every crease of the wallpaper. We have been here years now. You laugh and say, "We just got here." I curl up in that time always feels longer and longer. Nothing goes by fast enough. The light from the hallway reaches under the door around the line of the door jam. I don't know how to not put on my hat and leave in the night. You cast your magic in your own way. Piling dishes in front of the door so I can't go. So I fall asleep on the floor, the crack of the light in my eyes. And think of your spell. When is a door not a door? When it's a jar. Um, so one of the things that I do, um, uh, is, uh, I'm I'm a practicing witch, uh, because I think it's really important to have something that puts you in common with most people that live in Oakland. And and one of the things that I do, thank you. And one of the things that I do is specifically I teach um an ancestry uh worship and veneration workshop uh through the lens of poetry uh because I think poetry is actually a really good channeling mechanism for it. And so one of the poems that I teach is one of mine because I'm very vain. Um and uh and this is called ask about the women in your family. My grandmother couldn't cook so we wrote her out of the stories. Every holiday, every birthday, every day she spent preparing, we forgot her name. When we could remember it, it rolled foreign on our tongues and lips like boats too small for choppy swells. The family rings around the table, chair legs grinding on lenolum. Photo albums open, blooming like the flowers in her garden that we never notice. They spring up every year, untended, struggling through the weeds. We recognize our smiles, the shape of our eyes. We flip through the photos, but no one sees the person behind the camera. No one mentions her nose, the shape of her eyes. The one who organized and labeled the album script as tight and drawn as a mouth in concentration as you stir a quickly burning sauce. Her death is the equator, an invisible line declaring the loosely navigational space where the family stores our myths, the stars that predict who we are. Use we use as trinkets of navigation, books of genealogy, stories of war generals, sailing, settlement. We shout over her voice. She fades into the couch cover, a plastic thing protecting the fabric underneath. We never forgive her for dying. We never forgive her for not being able to make a meatloaf or a pie or a casserole. Her name was Patricia and we never really got over that. >> Yeah, Patricia. This is called suntanned windb blown. To remove the skin of a rabbit, you cut a hole in the back and tear, working your fingers under the fur and out like you're ripping open a package of taffies at the shore. The salty sea air making your hair curl. Be quick. Quick is the thing. The hard part is always the head. To remove the skin of a deer, you have to go slowly. Technique is important. Keep your eye on the knife, not on the iron hooks hanging from the ceiling. Don't let the clink of chains fill your head. Start at the back of the leg. Follow the tendons, learning the release of skin, separating from muscle and and from fat, split it from the back of the leg like it's coated in the most erotic of stockings. A bear is a bit like a human. You start at the wrist, the curl of the paw outstretched, split like the fur like parting a sea. Seam on seam on seam meetat at the throat, jaw, snout, highways of the body. The meat will glisten to pink and white soft angelic like Easter lilies. You'll be surprised at how the meat is stored. The legs mostly bone. Cut knuckles snap tivia. The symmetry will rock you to sleep. When you cut off your own skin, you won't be able to just tear open and out. Snap a leg bone from gliding from tendons. Careful to avoid the rump meat. It doesn't begin with a knife. It begins in the car. Day four. Two more than the map said because you're lost. So incredibly lost. And the car and your car is a classic chvel not built for long trips. And the crook of the neck of the girl you love is louder than the radio. You pull and tug at your exterior in hotel rooms at the sightes where she runs out and says, "Take my picture." And you pretend that the camera is the eye you see her through. The concave lens is the thing that sees her the most. Stark, arms outstretched, shadow among cacti. She can feel everything. Her sides pushed in from the world. And you stand with your camera and your skin worked off with a knife. Limp in your hands, limp in the heat, praying she'll eat you or wear you. YOU. SO, like 10 years ago, I uh I wrote a Zen and uh I I do tend to subscribe to the belief that reading things from 10 years ago tends to be pretty mortifying, but I would say that um that person is a very important part of how I became this person. And part of ancestral and veneration is venerating all of the people you've been before. So, I'm going to read a very old section of the first Zen I ever published called My Side of Our Story. I think this is the last copy I own. We met in a storm. I think it's fuzzy now. It feels so close in time, but distant in my mind. I've always said I loved you then, but how could I? Beginnings are always made up. This weird string of gasps. We met in a storm, hiding under the awning of a Chinese restaurant. the cuffs of your jacket dripping on the sidewalk. I said I knew a bar. I always knew bars back then. It's different now, I promise. But then I knew bars. And I can't remember anything about it, but I remember you and how the neon sign created an orange halo around your face. I don't remember how many drinks we had. More than enough. That was what I was drinking then. More than enough. You said I could text you and you stumbled a bit in the rain from the gin. You were drinking gin back then. You said you hated the taste, but once someone had told you it was sophisticated. I couldn't have possibly loved you already, but I did. I texted you, "Hi, how's your weekend?" like an idiot. What was I thinking? I should have been clever or funny or something, but you're texting back. I can see the little dots. My heart's staccato in my chest. It's going well. Your weekend. I'm sorry you got so You're sorry you got so drunk. You want to make it up to me? Okay, you can make it up to me. Whatever this mythical transgression is that we're both pretending exists, you can make it up to me and I can ask you about the six questions I thought of after you left last time. Where did you grow up? What songs are keeping you awake? Am I your type? What position do you sleep in? Are you into comic books? Are you going to break my heart? I hope I'm a good kisser. I have such a [ __ ] crush on you and have no idea if you like me at all or if you like me enough to want to be with me. No one has ever just looked me in the eyes and said they wanted me. Will you? I wish I wasn't a coward and can tell you how your face and chest flush when we [ __ ] haunts my dreams. That my bed smells of you and I bury my face in it while I jerk off. I don't even jerk off to the dirty stuff. I just jerk off to the connection. Intimacy causes shame. I can't tell the difference between need and want. It all feels too urgent. I want more of you. Want, want, want, want. I'm too old to be like this. You make my hands shake and my fists clenched. You're in my nervous system and I don't want to stop feeling like this. I'm a wadded up mess of desire. And all that I want is to feel your body shake under my fingers and to hold you so close. Your pulse pushes into my skin every second of every hour. I want us to know all of each other and I want you to love me. Thank you all. Heather, thank you for having me. This book is so incredible and I'm so honored to be here. Every time I hear Lauren read, I think, did I write that for the first couple of lines of the poem and then it goes somewhere else and I go, "No, I didn't. I didn't. I'm about to learn something new." Well, it's weird enough that we own some of the same jewelry and, you know. Anyway, moving on. Uh, Cassandra Delot is legitimately a legend in the poetry world in the Bay. Legitimately a legend. And um I don't know. I I have said repeatedly, so some people are probably tired of hearing it that she's also uh on my list of people that I want on my team come the zombie apocalypse. So, >> no, I just think we could really keep each other safe. Please welcome cast. >> To be honest, I take this whole lineup in the zombie apocalypse. Yeah. I mean, these are my people. I feel like we could we could survive. I mean, we're going to have to Thank you so much. I'm so excited for your book, Heather, and always to see you and read with you. You know that. And write with you as well. The grave through the graveyard of AI billboards lining the drive into my once beloved city. Both artificial intelligence and private prisons rely on the extraction of vast amounts of highly marginalized, undervalued or uncompensated human labor. That is quoted from AI. >> Bland billboards celebrate the death of the artist, musician, immigrant, the Bay View, the shipyards, the Fillmore, the mission of culture, the family scattered away from this whiteo town. A joke robot playland for white boy ego. Look what I can do with machine. Only because I can. Not because of any usefulness or any hope for the future. Celebrating the very things stealing from us. Things that take us further from the quiet clapping of leaves green between our toes. Water clean cold splashed from a hose in summer. Sipped from a stream we kneel before. Here we are be beholdened to the se cementicious terazzo robo taxi chariots. Confused windup toys block the flow of ordinary people. None of us even know what these billboards are talking about. They say things like stop hiring humans. Someone actually thought that was cute. How many duckets or cash apps? You want to bet it was not a woman and their complexion quite pale, bleached and colorless like an Apple store. Polished concrete, carefully calibrated, autonomous, neutral, colored, bland, just coding, not creating or bonding or [ __ ] in fighting. By which I mean living as a human [ __ ] being riding mun getting a bit dirty in tunnel in town. Why implode like this when every sci-fi movie has warned us? They are running the Zionist manosphere with cheekbones of filler, hair plugs, mushroom dick, and greed is good. Greed is God. They will devour everything once beautiful here. Ever since slavery became illegal, they have found ways to get back their free labor. From black codes to private prisons to migrate detention, Walmart workers on welfare bleed data. Captive markets gig work goes from unprotected to obsolete. The screens, this is for my sister Angel from her rumpled comforter on the couch. She says streaming has her so strung out. The screens call to her worse than heroin once did. You don't have to get out of bed to cop to escape. Me too. I say it's the womb we climb into. Outside news so cruel. A cabin in the woods. She says she's ready. Burn it all down. I say change everything. The world is in the shits and we've worked compassion to the bone. She says she can't leave the house or answer the phone. Surrounded by filthy dishes. I don't offer to scrub. I say, "Well, I've envied your cleanliness for years." She says, "I can't anymore. I'm not me anymore. I'm just broken. can't finish a thing. I say every woman I speak to says the same. Not long COVID or the vaccine, just quietly quitting a giving up on what on that which once mattered so much. Letting the roof get dusty and cave in on us in the TV's blue stream. Using all the therapized language the socials have given us. All the acronyms for sad. We grew up too fast then grew old and slowed. Hit a wall. I can't think of a good reason she should want to live. I'm already jonesing to slip into the stories of someone else. So, I go home, watch my TVs and my movies and shows, shop for things to arrive at my door. I don't really know what's so great about leaving the house anyway. Sorry, these are really new, so not not so much edited. An article on Facebook says, "Men are healthier when they sleep next to women. Women, however, are healthier when they sleep next to dogs. I hunger sleep solitary in opposition to a life of love chasing, sex making, filling of minutes with annoying lovers so as not to be alone, breathing their smoke and snore. No longer longing, I hunker. I slumber. I curl into myself a large lima bean or spread out in the middle of mattress filling the inches of fresh sheet like time like desire climbing into the empty spaces just me and mine and the K9. Sometimes they leave me a little sliver to sleep in. They're very greedy dogs. Feeding the alligators. Hard to know really. Should we hop in the car and drive right down to Home Depot? There must be plenty of folks protecting the workers. How will anything get built, get picked? Who will wire my new fan into the ceiling? On TV, we see so many brave souls throwing their bodies in front of ICE. I am not brave, not tear gas brave. This administration will criminal criminalize protests. And I do have a record. They will lock up any woman or child just out here trying to live. All day long I work with health care and housing authority. All day long I wonder what happens when all this goes away. Marching is not enough. Voting is broken. Two parties have let us down as we knew it would. Memes of revolution everywhere but in our need for technology. Tech bro billionaires party on our graves on the beaches of Palestine. Hide evidence of private island rendevu. What is this obsession with youth? My face alone a protest. They killed a man today. Children chased down coming from school. What of the humans plucked like strawberries from the stem? We warned as we watched the dictators flare for feeding alligators. Super villains disguised as book peddlers. Fly me to the moon. Your implants to be used as flotation devices. Face stretched thin over the GLP1 pigishness. See how snatched my waist. See how rejuvenated my coochie. There is no off-rid left to hide. They will flock our animal movement. So we work and call our mothers. Together we curse and quit the cable news. Order the gravel from Home Depot delivered so we don't have to see the faces. Only the descendants of native or slave should dictate immigration here. None of us could afford rent if we hadn't approved a mortgage mortgage. The shanty town on East 12 Bulldo landfill is tenfold. Plastic in our very cells. But what to do first? Stand in front of this $200 billion stormtrooper or keep heads down after all the [ __ ] we talked delay our own demise. We've installed our very own dictator like a state to the heart. >> Thank you so much. And again, congratulations, Heather. Thanks for having me. >> I did warn you. You know, I was joking with somebody today about how uh how many people successfully managed to not be in this room for for these shows. Tens of thousands of San Franciscans, Bayerans managed to avoid winding up in this room. So, um just know that how very special you are. very exclusive. >> It's very exclusive, >> but I have to say it's really busy tonight and I could not be more excited. Um, particularly because I have had the unalloyed pleasure of listening to Heather read her poetry um, often twice a month in open Zoom open mic that I run. And uh I've watched it change and I've watched it stretch and I've watched her grow into space in all kinds of great ways. And so I'm going to share that experience with those of you who have not had it yet. And welcome Heather Flesher up to this microphone. Or that one. That one works too. >> Yeah. No, it's great. >> So great to be here. This is a piece from my latest book and it's called more. I waited a year so I could have a minute. And a minute is not very long. A minute can be quite special. It can hold a unique experience which is only capable of happening right there and right then. It can bring an extraordinary encounter containing joys and wonders. Bring it live and direct, straight to the heart, full to the brim. But as fast as it fills, it empties again. A minute is not very long. It feels even shorter the more I need to wait. And for this minute, I waited a year. This minute was a tiny portion of a day. And the day was a magical, bountiful festival, bustling with words and speech and vision, overflowing with parallel performances, sprawling across the downtown streets, stacked up leg by leg by leg, more than any audience could ever absorb. So full that it's worth a year-long wait. So full that each minute holds depth and meaning and clear, bright revelation. But a minute is not very long. As I stroll from one venue to the next, there is so much to take in. The streets are not the carpet of my room. The buildings are not the walls of my room. The sky is not the ceiling of my room. I'm in a different city, a long way from home. There are people who gather from near and from far. Some people I know or I'm getting to know. There are people around who are never around. And they're here. And I'm here. And we're here. Finally, face to face. So natural with no screens in between. It's true. These beings, these poets exist. They sign their books. They give me hugs. It's all authentic. I feel warm. I feel glad for this time that we have, for this chance encounter in the midst of so much. For this portion of a day that holds all a day can. This special connection that lasts about a minute. A minute that is not very long. But a year of waiting and two hours of driving each way were necessary and justified for this day of reading and hearing and sharing. Facing challenges worthy of the sacrifice to surmount them until the momentum is drained by my body, my stubbornly chronically ill body, my treacherous body whose needs I must serve, which decides now it has to retreat and withdraw. With two whole legs of the event still in store, still going on, still wonderfully real, still happening close by in every direction, still packed with brilliant visionary poets dwindling in the rear view mirror as I scurry back home, head held low. Back to my bed, the center of my life where I am bound beneath the yoke of my chronic fatigue. The invisible barrier which keeps me home to recuperate from my huge energy expenditure. Paying for every last bit of exertion by days and by weeks. Staying still and waiting to collect what there is of my life again. Wait and remember those special minutes. Replay those minutes for the comfort they still manage to bring me. I hold each minute in my head like a half empty glass. It's easy to replay them over and over as many times as I want to because a minute is not very long. >> Thank you. This is another one from my new book and it's called The Worst. I have to be ready every time, wherever, whenever I'm in public. No matter where I am, I am a transwoman and anyone can tell this at a glance. It comes with a collection of challenges, but this one is the worst. I have to be ready for a certain reaction, and there won't be time to think. It doesn't happen often, but the stakes are too high to risk it. I'll be walking along, and a parent sees me and pulls their child back out of the way. pulls them back so they're farther away from me. Though all I was doing was walking. And then I know he sees me as a threat. I look like something that should not be allowed around children. I didn't do anything. And I can't do anything because I have to make sure nothing I do increases his perception of me as a threat. Because I have been assaulted before by people who called me a pervert and a predator. Because I want to make it home alive. It doesn't matter that I would never do what they're afraid of. It doesn't matter that I'm a trained counselor, a survivor's advocate, a crisis intervenor who helps trauma victims to process and heal, or that I'm a sexual abuse survivor myself. It doesn't matter that in the meantime, while people are putting all their attention on me, actual pedophiles out there are free to go anywhere and do anything to anyone as long as they have enough privilege and they look normal. What matters is that every time I'm in a public place, I have to be fully aware if there is a child nearby I don't know. I have to make sure I won't be perceived as moving towards them, talking to them, making any gesture that might get their attention, or acknowledging that I see them at all. I pretend they aren't there. We are not in the same reality. They simply don't exist. If I do a really good job of pretending they don't exist, I maximize my chances of making it home in one piece. This strategy works fine most of the time. A part of the reason is because I'm very selective about where I try to use it. For example, I don't even bother going into public restrooms. The one type of room where every person is subject to an extra level of gender scrutiny. The one type of room where every person is explicitly given social permission and legal protection to attack me. The scariest room in the building. Even thinking about it makes me start to panic. No goddamn way am I going in there. If I can't hold it long enough, I guess I can't be in that place. I don't get to be in very many places. There is no way I can express how utterly humiliating and dehumanizing and infuriating it is that random people assume with no basis whatsoever that I am someone who wants to do horrible things, the worst things I can imagine to the most innocent and vulnerable members of our society. At times I am seized by a frantic impulse to scream until my throat is raw. To tell them and keep telling them and never stop telling them until every last one of them has heard this. I've never harmed you. I've never done anything to you. I've never done this thing you're so afraid of to anybody. I just want to walk in the park, go to the mall, eat in the restaurant. I just want to live. But I can't even tell them that. You can't go telling people you're not a child molester because that makes them more suspicious. In our society, you either get to start out with the assumption that you're not a predator like most people get to start out, or else you're stuck with that stigma, no matter how false it is, forever. I have been living as female in the United States for 15 years. My self-protective habits are ingrained from having to practice them hundreds of times. I don't even think about them. Each action is automatic and so occasionally I'm caught by surprise when I meet someone who doesn't think of me this way. One time I'm having coffee with a new friend. As part of the conversation of getting to know each other, she mentions she has kids. I pause silently. This could be tricky. I nod my head cautiously and hope she'll change the subject, but she goes on, "Would you like to see a picture of them?" Now I freeze. I try so hard to avoid doing anything that parents would ever see as suspicious. I would never ask anyone to show me their children. It just wouldn't occur to me under any circumstances. But she offered to let me see them. I have to remind myself this is normal. She's a mother. She's proud of her kids. I'm a woman and I'm her new friend. She thinks she's doing something ordinary. She is doing something ordinary. I'm the one who's all bent out of shape from a lifetime of absorbing the continuous onslaught of toxic messages from this hostile society. And she may not realize it, but just by treating me like an ordinary woman in an ordinary interaction, she is giving me a gift. The basic level of trust and acceptance I don't get from most people. And I don't know how to respond. and I'm still wrestling with it when finally I force myself to say, "Sure, I I'd like that." She taps the screen on her phone and hands it to me. I see a brightly lit, colorful photograph of two small children playing in a pile of autumn leaves. Nothing happens. No one attacks me. The world doesn't end. It's fine. It's just a picture of a couple of kids smiling, happy, safe. the way all kids should be. A tear comes to my eye as I look at them. They're adorable. >> Thank you so much. I have one more, but first I just want to thank um Colleen and Lauren. Um, I want to thank Cassandra, of course. I want to thank Kim and Collapse Press for publishing my book. This is something, this actually is the first poem that I ever read anywhere in the Bay Area, and it was part of Moonrop Productions, which Cassandra is the co- co-organizer of. Um, and it goes like this. Dece oh but this is also in in in my second chatbook o over there which is called another crazy transwoman in case you're interested. >> Okay. December 26, 1991. Home on winter break from college. Flash. Flash. Flash. Strings of tiny lights stretch around my parents living room. Brightly colored bulbs still perform their duties, though right now it's not clear what they're celebrating. Flash. Flash. Flash. reflected in the shiny bits of paper. Paper on the floor, in the corners, in the garbage. Drips of water fall off the icicles drooping from the eaves and land in thick drifts of snow. Today, I have the house to myself for several hours. A rare thing, a crucial thing. It's time for the ceremony. Four hits of manila bladder acid. Four tiny squares sit on my tongue. A clean batch, a potent batch. Sampled before, found effective. Ready for the real deal. After a quick shower, I unlock the trunk in the corner of my room, my personal stash of feminine clothing, and I reverently begin to put on the proper attire. Lingerie, panty hose, and a gleaming white gown with an ornately constructed imitation red rose decorating the waistline. It's a prom dress I got from my friend Sam, who is currently living as a butch lesbian and will ultimately pursue a gender transition. at the time. I don't know yet that he's a trans man and he doesn't know yet that I'm a trans woman, but we both know he has no use for this dress anymore. It took him away from who he was. But maybe it will bring me closer to something. The LSD is starting to kick in. I look in the mirror and observe. The lace adorning the neckline of my gown has become a field of rotating spirals, slowly growing as they spin outwards. The glossy fabric is no longer simply reflecting the fluorescent light, but is covered in glowing pinpoints illuminated from within. I am in my place of power. This is it. Time for the next step. I removed the cellophane from my new compact disc by a group called the legendary pink dots. The CD is called The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse, and Rolling Stone magazine compared it favorably to Pink Floyd. That's really all I know about it, but that was enough to persuade me to save it for this occasion, to leap into the unknown. I pop it into the player, slide on my headphones, get comfortable on the couch, and away we go. The first thing I notice is how dense and atmospheric the music is. Lush instrumentation with strange sonic effects layered into a mix that's constantly shifting. This is state-of-the-art psychedelia, making complete use of the studio and its options. There's a whole world in here for me to explore. And the second thing I noticed is that the lyrics are full of negativity, dealing with alienation and self-hatred and addiction and despair. And every ending is a sad one. And I ought to put on something else. I shouldn't be listening to this right now. But it's it's all so compelling, so precisely elegantly rendered. Also, I don't know if I can stand up at the moment. So, I guess I'm stuck in this mode and I might as well hear what comes next. There's a song about Jack the Ripper and a song about being forced to work on an endless mechanical assembly line. A song about being condemned to hell and tortured for other people's entertainment. A song that culminates in nuclear war and the senseless death of all humanity. This is not like the early playful Pink Floyd. The m the the material that I prefer. More like the more like the mid to late period everything is [ __ ] up Pink Floyd. and I'm getting increasingly upset. I wanted to let this album carry me to new realms of adventure and revelation, braving the great unknown. And instead, I'm resisting. I'm hanging on to reality, hanging on to everything I wanted to escape from. What? My fears weren't enough, so I had to find extras. The heavy, dismal music surrounds me like the overcorated, tight fitting gown I'm wrapped up in. And who am I wrapped up for and why? Hiding away from everyone I know. Not sure who or what I really am. and unable to tell anyone about it. Who do I think I'm fooling? Is this all a scheme to trick myself? To convince myself I'm something I'm not? I look down at my body. It's still there under the synthetic white material, unfortunately. I glance around the room at the blinking plastic lights. No longer friendly and happy. Now they seem fake and useless. And everything is fake and useless. And I am fake and useless. Finally, the album comes to its end. emptiness, a breath of merciful silence, but then a bonus track. It's an old-fashioned fable about a wealthy woman plagued by obnoxious, aggressive suitors, and yet she finally discovers true love with the scruffy, humble, ordinary fellow next door. The music is pleasant with harpsacords chattering melody and horns blowing a majestic fanfare. The story is a bit cliched, but I don't care. It's sweet. I clutch at it. I embrace it. And I feel it lift me up. The ocean of desolation begins to part. This song is about love. And love is what matters. The fortunate couple can love. And I can love. I'm tingling all over. Tears of joy are streaming down my cheeks. It doesn't matter who I am or what I look like or where I'm going. I can work out all of that in time. I know I will be okay. Yes, in the future I will be okay because the only thing that matters ever is love. And I managed to keep believing that for several more hours as long as the acid lasts. Thank you. I don't know how many people in this room are asked to write blurbs for other people's books, but I will tell you I will open a window for you into something that's uh true. Quite often when you see the words, "This is an important book," someone couldn't think of something nice to say about a specific piece of writing. Unfortunately, that's true. But I'm going to call this latest book of Heathers important. Not because I can't find nice things to say about it, but because it's important >> for a lot of reasons. And uh I have to recommend you get um one of her books. And can I suggest because I made a big mistake with this one, Another Crazy Transwoman. I quite innocently punched that into a search engine in order to find the book. And it took me two years to get to stop getting weird right-wing anti-trans. >> What? >> Yeah. >> Well, it didn't help. It didn't help because I was immediately in anyway, but thank you for the tip because that was one that probably would have taken care of some of it. Um, but there are some here tonight. And since it's so very difficult to get this without attracting the attention of some very ghoulish humans, uh, I recommend you get it. I am going to read a very short poem and then, um, every one of our readers tonight, I think, has books on the table. Am I correct in that? >> Every what? >> You don't have any. Oh, I'm wrong. um >> two two of our readers tonight have books on the table and uh yeah and um so I'm going to read this also from another crazy trans woman eggshell. She never lied to them. She may have spoken in language they did not understand. They may have heard only what they wanted to hear, but what she said was absolutely necessary. And what she said was fact. What she said to them was, "This is who I am." She was born early, though it took an eternity to get there. She was hatched from an egg too solid to push out of, so it shattered all at once. She prepared herself with meticulous care to step out, to step up, to step through. She prepared herself with painstaking care to be the consort of the gods, to offer them what they wanted. The gods of internal combustion engines, of adrenaline, of self asssurance, of the nightclub labyrinth, of opening doors that to others stay shut, of seats that recline, of pupils that widen, of the right to be wherever they are. She prepared herself, but no mortal is prepared for the gods. She never lied to them. She presented herself wrapped up in an array of signs and symbols passed down by generations, altering and accentuating, reframing and renaming. It's a very old language. It's what she had to work with. Her only sin was to presume she was as worthy as the rest. Worthy to stand on their level, to walk in their world. and she did only to find that they were not worthy of her. The gods so great and mighty at whose command crowds parted and beacons were lit and offerings were brought forth were revealed behind their god masks as petty, selfish, childish men. always afraid, obsessed with their status, fearing it was not enough, fearing it would be taken away, deluding themselves and raging when their assumptions were wrong. She offered them what they wanted and asked for so little in return. And they tried to take everything. She never lied to them and they never spoke the truth at all. The gods are always ending worlds. One night they ended hers. Cast out into the abyss to break and scream and bleed. Down, gone, over. And yet the end would not stop her. Her scars will remain. And in years to come, they will grow blurry like a stamp on her hand that said she paid to get in. Damn right she paid in full. The shards of eggshell are scattering, buffeted by the cold night wind. When a world of innocence is murdered, this is what is born. She is sore. She is sticky. She is solemn. She stirs. She shivers. She sigh. She stretches. She stands. She survives. I don't often get brought to tears or near to tears by somebody else's writing. I can make myself cry, but it takes a lot from somebody else. Thank you for that poem and thank you for tonight. Thank you John Smallley who called himself a librarian. He is so much more than that. He has been my partner in this activity and next year it will be our 10th year. I sound like a kid, don't I? I'm almost 10. Thank you, Mike, for your endless support with the tech stuff and the the incredible slide that you created, somebody created for this, which is really exciting. And thank you all for being here. It's a really full house and that's fun to see. Please give yourselves a round of applause. Now, if you can buy books,