good to see all of you here i'm kimberly nightingale and i'm the executive director of the same call meg and it is the day after christmas and it's co my california friends and relatives think we're crazy to be here and  e if you haven't heard the same we published your stories your poetry your lives in our book and we publish them here so if you're interested in sending work extended the deadline to december thirty the black box and sponsoring our lord henry james for many years and i would ask you supported by buying it during their food and keeping them going it's been a tough struggle here with that like real closing down their streets for about two years artist likes to read her poetry and hopes to spend the next year learning how to effectively foster creative tendencies when she isn't getting paid to sling espresso for motorcyclists she can usually be found playing with boisterous kittens devouring the patriarchy traveling everywhere sending letters and trying sometimes desperately yes to feel free please welcome  you know facebook is like you know digital you know so we haven't so if you see i could yet chosen family i'll do a couple of homes not about that a couple that are couple about my like actual family who i think you still have to choose away because it's very easy to say hell no to your grandma not easy to do without being slapped but easy to do so yeah let me start off with this poem i just sort of last night because i was like i don't have anything about my friends body in my blood are distant or distant i swell with light veins thick with whites easy planes bizarre stars a single god with too many names for you i've grown a second mouth let me get drunk again let me turn off the music and speak too loud if you will pause your torque i will give you my heart wrapped in a billy sparks in burning i've never been good at love i fake it until it flies or gods if they treat you well now go drink my house dry show the earth how drought is done if you need me to hold your hair back i will if you need me to i will if you need i will if you  the letters in the word common into majesty from your own secret secret marks an army of girls made of rusted armor new bodies born breathed the king's blood oath to violence you raise them to fight a different war a prayed over humble kingdom left to work at the battery factory at the school at the airport face paint and back to brown a cheap expensive looking scarf wrapped tight as hands with a hi joe black and blue collar by the time i learned your amazing grace before i misplace my mouth and my hands abandoned me you must know this i love this life yours i think god every moment i can for breath for water for blood i am forever in your debt for turning the thorns into cotton for teaching them by your breather to only sing smoke but if you have one spun yourself into the night for good went back to your own grandmother's home before you made the one who made me i wouldn't mind if you were safe i would rejoice in my shamelessness before i was crowned with longs and skin i was the voice you heard making while making your dungeon  go go in love with straight boyfriends and then i write poems and try to write it out i don't like this guy anymore which is really good because he's like a brother but not a brother that if you like kind of incest ok for some people but this is like one of those poems that i wrote to like get in the latest dream you're a knife i'm bread jesus is there feeding me to the world but it's none of my business i'm too busy with my own holding the more you take the more i give days i wake in a rush to fall back asleep when you wait on a bed of hands i chant speak easy given skin it's pro prohibition i am a devout christian the pastor is my hero i will be the image of glory himself flesh rolled in from i b cloth but my mouth isn't on his thing unless the question is gin he craves the stain i swore i'd never be one of those tragic queens stubble post over men who were never boys tucked in the corners of locker rooms too afraid to look and not look but here i go tragic mornings and gross with the backs of knees elbows where your leg becomes your other leg what parts of you hold the most salt in a past life you were a wolf i served loyal in your pack we feasted while we feasted our god moon improved red in the sheen of your fain even beat the dough that we how the road in the presence of your breath or the curve of your palm i chant my aid my brother my dog my homie my nigger family right hand brother from another born from some matter thicker than water thicker than blood or iron or whatever else makes anatomy possible i pipe dream missed the bus hope was to be your kind of sin to trouble the air around your neck waiting in the cold a chance no twice in the dark i thought to trade bodies with the girl that you had got in five four but i couldn't have discovered your flesh was still learning hers i want you this like this for and about before i have no place to say in that you never pete across a room or across the still twitching dinner but in this life whatever you wondered about job lines and shoulders you never saw it with your hands and if your hands do with anything they were not given mouse for a reason i'm afraid next time i say your name i'll scream when my mother asked me to be her facebook friend i did not think i would recognize her if it weren't for her clothes i might have mistaken her for old skin and stubborn fosset singing for no reason i have stopped dreaming about her abandon what used to be and have taken it for what it is a crippled lightning a toothless coward deaf and i am my own bow to this day she has mistaken me for her has marked me as her dependent our cross hatching genes but which way for government welfare used my name without permission stole in photographs of me and called me her own claiming to have made possible mother i should be dead if it weren't for the magic of crashing stars you are the reason behind so recklessly and fighting like a dog mother i fought like a dog torn so much skin and picked up the scabs not getting about how a scar mom look at my scar after the murder show how alive i have been without you how my heart still boils every time something tastes of love mother you are my only one who i have not forgotten your teeth our hearts your midnight stilettos drumming our heads flicker spinning on the ceiling on your breath the salt of your tongue after the swine of these hands and the feathers of a down thousand cannot compare i wish i could have known you at ten when everything was a simple as a kite or a fifteen when arrogance could be justified you look older than you are these days perhaps a decade of silence has created a callous on your hard perhaps i have done wrong i cannot help it it would be false a love you any other way anything i am a broken smoke anything you are you are if i am a sand smoke a cough any of anything if i am broken i will swallow a harvest of violins i will swallow a harvest of violins to know something other than thunder to know something other than thunder than the other i know to swallow the thunder of violence will harvest something think of something anything think of a place if my if if if it is not to smoke it will swallow your harvest to the broken thunder if you are anything i am sad and when i am home i will be a cough any of ashes violins cannot know anything other there are words that and or the velocity of time they do not run faster flutter or disappear on the time they do not apologize for their swallowed they never clutter the heart or the mouth they do not shatter in the the perception of beauty is a moral test that was the real to allow them their own words despite the insistence of action we've built the house and the in soil on lake street making prayer from liquor or providing whatever kneeling provides you with this is night in the after and ever slaughtering down single speeds taco trucks home a we've been hazarding guesses and substitutes for seven up and the compatibility of cooks in this country however many women building well bones broken the kitchen along twenty four hours or so weeks and s boiling the lord's work however many houses and doors the same streets and walks that houses the routes the helixes stringing along the fascia between the skin and the meat i don't know blackened with shrimp complete with shell still you'd normally live it marinate for two hours he tells me but heirlooms like to suffer so leave it in the fridge for twenty for the rare occasion his lover would cook for him i call that some tiny victory and a little revolution mornings i'm dizzying to the market venturing for eggs woken by beings grinding in the hole home for a while and be like oh man i learned heterosexuality and cooking from the same man that's here and then and i was picking with a friend from pittsburgh years ago your kitchen dr just a kitchen top and i was like i'm heart by carlos boozer i imagine my grandfather in some third world fantasy putting his hand on my father's shoulder before he took some fifty style yellow cab to some small runway some small plane some small babylon some chicago again the plane landing and cowering beneath the city's name when i flew to los angeles with him we rented a four door and drove around for hours cool desert a night i can't remember in the blind los angeles blacktop bounding you see that building that's recall that told me she was pregnant told me we were pregnant with  you an old friend of his sat up with me late that night going through a box of photos trying to find my father sleeping a few rooms over or hiding in the bottom of a cigar box this is chance she tells me and i see her sitting on the floor of some empty apartment tiny apparently a little serpent around her forearm tail in her left hand kissing its fangs nodding off on the hardwood just see a namesake is like a flight the second you step through a metal detector you are patted down the officer is just as tired smelling like nevada minnesota georgia looking like missouri your waved through effortless but i think you're the midwest is nice this time of year and you become the same a protocol carton dropped walking on the tarmac dropped like waking dropped lost your mind between the taser is the take off the descent the rotunda is the taxi here you are and while the  still curse inflicts enduring the sightline will sleep with you bend as wrought iron in the hands of him be the city's difference it's the sacred land under graffiti masquerading as a window seat just see where ever you land the prodigal has been here before made this but the middle child i named him dad for good julie is as in caesar and his brothers the greats napoleon ferdinand alexander derek i know each of them is kuya i named them retired from one military mind beating each other's teeth in prodigies in violence free pass from one world to the next apple pie served to filipinos full mouth speaking the language it tastes of garnish with medals and memorials years and years and years of bullets whistling floating just humming birds watching or was it she her life in a bed in some suicide wing on the west coast overlooking some hidden beach their sister we call her emma immaculate of concepcion deflowered beaten into the sand of her same beach are brothers and crucified a product of lust which is vengeance and slavery everything in the name of the one brother who did not land stateside the city he legs and the false confidence of flight he was called breathe count don't push yet inside my mississippi night i dream of them as bullets already born in unison lying to me names but words calling me their own whistling floating baby b gracious see how we flickers fall off the edge the good god rest in custom and things with less cultured men go with god i am her emma knowing her as i see her she tel diamond back the have brothers visit him and can't keep up to his montreal i stopped drinking but now you're here i've stopped sending remittances back home and now you're that this is about trying to be happy most months i was concerned with cancer and how taller buildings were which warehouse the freaks would find this week what makes a skyscraper skyscraper where the suits would pull the streets from their roots or a bar of the banks of the river tonight not wealth or with photos and drawings implied any more now which cities colors you could trust just where the smoke and tripping make disease would be funnier deliriums with the families glad about the running starting up again eager to feed me and any return they can get now is used to my asking for the skates not the or after emptying buckets in the basement of pol tonight we stand our faces with fire water to the edge to the toast to the red man's reservation and little earth between the tenement in the south side highway of the late liquors  our plunder in the streets of mogadishu they dream of this bedlam your father worked hard works hard says the mother half life but his woman is closer at twenty and housebroke twelve stories up on the west bank of the river divides sweet laundry lost down like a dream overhead and adobo slow in the kitchen is ready coming up the highway from behind the clouds circus like an effigy burning there and the first time you hear gunshots praise the writers from eastlake not the shields from the district who ain't always much better the way fire that rope can be better the fire is supreme instead julies is crying in the kitchen with his sharp suit on his way through the city will find us if we don't watch the searchers it tag off the garage by the first the squad cars just squeal julius gives his brother his gun back was it the six shots that missed the swat team he read of the wrong chinks of the business and all slept in one room with a child and an infant a man with his wife who were shot at in a round with a glint of his gun shown and somehow zero forty or one hundred missed with the six fired in the right to intrusion or the lone pig who'd been found out in plain clothes and assaulted by some run point blank his chest made of kevlar called out from medics with member of the squad car the white cop approached and a loaded yellow boy on the ground bleeding in the face of my father crying on everyone's doorstep this is who we are we're teachers we're union workers we are and our guests there are women and children among us he said they're young and innocent people hear someone in the crime of murder i want them to come in with all these little kids thing and get of the news then they realize what they've been doing how can you say that since some of us this is who we are young and innocent vandals an addict murderers and mother we're told we're exhausted and everything except started we'd been working for so long that it was time to run the things channels couldn't broadcast t v had tried to tell a story is how loud it was it was so loud the volume in all the living rooms and sports bars across the country would have to get turned up by satellite the news would have to break the stereos and shatter the spring once the flashings got going we couldn't see or speak at a regular register we shouted everything you said are you look at me and when the camera flash i started to laugh one of the kids themselves and the man just to give them a little more trouble i guess when we got to jail the sub being f on the floor remembering ground that an anarchist shared with me and i had to sit scrunched up again hands on your head she was afraid she kept talking about killing her so what was i supposed to say to that no one plans for that in the manifest one my mother and i don't have dinner table conversations out of courtesy we don't want to remind each other accents her voice is a vietnamese all of a sudden to an empty bed the taste of her hometown still kick in the back of her teeth my voice is bleach my voice has no history my voice is the ringing of an empty picture frame the frequency of the t v turned off to my birth name is humanly and but today i don't know myself as anything other than labeling from the wires i am only fluent in apologies three when i look at my childhood photos the ones taken by my mother i have to remind myself that in that moment i understood her that in that moment i knew what she was saying cleaned up my speech injury parent teacher conferences the teacher was surprised that her mother was asian just assumed i was adopted she assumed that this voice is the same one i started out with six sometimes when i watch home movies i don't even understand myself my childhood as a foreign film all of my favorite memories have been dubbed in english seven actually holds a pair of chopsticks a friend asked me why i am using a fork teller it's much easier she says in the voice the strokes on the roof of my mouth not in vietnam means the name here or means pious it means understanding it means tradition it means devotion in english means nothing ten i've accepted the fact that i am no longer vietnamese just asian just a clip by the poster boy of white washed my skin has been burning easier these days my voice box i no one brave enough to reach then too afraid of which enabled the blade might be sleeping it is easy to forget the bad guys but easier to polish the good ones to keep it fresh and fat like the newly clean maraca you shake their heads and ask us if we can hear the little rock skipping across your torso it ripples my face into a smile like it's supposed to and i know that this is another memory that i will say stored in her cheeks for the next time you forget to talk for four days the only time to laugh is when you are present when your mind is holding its breath they will wait for the merc to slowly drain away for the smoke to lift it stuns off your eyes before they can see that there was nothing dangerous we did in the fall but they've hidden all of the sharp things and forgotten where they it was the winter we learned how to properly smoke a cigarette or it was a spring we found parker's dog making go after all the snow had melted we decided that this neighborhood was too cement to meddle there was too much gravel collecting inside the soles of my shoes sometimes which shaped our sneakers and pretend we were somewhere exotic after daniel  made a paper machine leftover programs we filled that with deadlines and tried to beat the wishes out of them i think we were not i could be lying but i distinctly remember losing your last three baby teeth after your dad bounced your face of the garage door or maybe it was just a very vivid dream and stouter forgets to visit the street it is too busy with tree houses and rock springs and doesn't have time for all of this great all of my favorite memories are the ones away from home i think i think it was the summer i broke my wrist or maybe it was the summer when mom started selling part of your basement or maybe it was the summer of both when we fill our backpacks with cereal and ran away to the playground three miles from home i think we walked or bikes or maybe it was the summer stoner parents bright green supports lights beckon them home for supper ditching the mosquito halos by the tires playing how they sounded like children how they laugh and jumped saying like children when i was three i found a tooth brush in the trash i picked it up washed off and placed it back on the coming later that day i found it on the bathroom floor snapped at the neck when my mother told me you were leaving i sat in the doorway convince you would come back i was so sure last winter i outgrew your jacket the sleeves cut into my shoulders hundred hands but the way they gripped i should have known you would outgrow this family was it the last time i made a father's day card i coated my hands in glue peeled it off with it dried stuff the shreds of my palms in a mailbox i didn't have your address i was just hoping my hands just knew where they came desk your desk cluttered with photos of your new family the smile of it don't know where you came from you wouldn't look at me your brother grabs you by the shoulders and told you  him when you were finally brave enough to face your hunting brave enough to see the leftovers riding inside our fridge you looked at me like an empty wallet like court papers hung up on my high school graduation my heart told me that our voices were so similar i began talking to myself told myself how proud you were told myself that you were coming back i often wonder if i would be informed died what i just know would it feel any different i imagine your purse it looks like a moving truck but this time only one box you haven't died yet you live only three miles away and sometimes i find myself driving down the street i don't know what i'm looking for it's hard to make that i miss you every time i drop a football or nick myself shaving there are so time for these lessons i want you to teach me sometimes i find you next to me at a stoplight and i want to cause a traffic jam sometimes i hope you're not wearing your seatbelt hope the windshield will kiss your face like a dove razor the road arms open and ready to catch but sometimes i imagine that we are in the same car just heading home after we put my grandmother to sleep in an incinerator they returned her to us in a tin cube along with a plastic bag full of things that refused to melt nails screws a titanium kneecap her wedding rings still solid was placed in the urn surrounded by her dust her and i thought skin was the only thing holding one's body together she sat in books for months not sure what to do with our no purpose outside of a body that took my mother eight years to accept me for being game for eight years i sat and watched my house burn and watched her save the baby photos but leave the baby i know why should be grateful that she came around at all that she forgave i've been told that it's not her fault it's how she was raised i've been told that it's our family's old way of thinking i've been told to forgive th is thing has lived inside her body and her mother's and her mother's father i've been told that once you've been stabbed it is better to leave the blade inside the body removing the dagger will only open the wound further crawling from the ashes holding a gas can and in his hands