a youth writing mentor from providence rhode island she's also a nationally published fiction and nonfiction writer who's received awards for her work i think it's really cool that she was the two thousand and eleven providence grand slam champion and had the opportunity to perform on the final stage of the national poetry slam where she and her teammates took third when she isn't writing the laura works as an urban farmer growing food on two vacant lots in providence and selling the in a culture where too often people are isolated from each other in favor of screens glowing screen or is mom is an english teacher her dad a storyteller and she takes any opportunity she can to be in rooms where beautiful things are being said out loud speaking out loud i give you laura brown the  today in the spirit of innovation i sal for the first time ever publicly unveil my greatest invention thus far my pen tool let's get a close up here it's basically caribbean or that hooks on your belt loop attached to a piece of string with that scotch tape to a generic ballpoint pen simple so sleek do you have a pull on your work pants jim a pen in their back pocket hop on your bike trying to get to the farm to beat the midday heat and while you're writing you come up with a great idea for a poem but you hit a pothole and when you stop at a red light to reach for your pen it's gone now any more folks do you ever have an endless row of green beans to pick and a freakin justin bieber song stuck in your head and you're like think about something else think about something else so of course you think about your ex boyfriend and how alone you are which eventually brings you back around to what wendell berry wrote about the androgyny of the farmer how we're always in a sexual dance with the earth and switching roles in the springtime we plant the seeds and she receives them litter the field is full of beans and we are the receiver and there's something a rhotic about it the smell of salon to know that lingers on your fingers long after picking time and you convince yourself you're not actually so alone out here in the field and when you get to the end of the road with your bucket full of beans you've got the beginning of a hell of a poem but you've been crouching standing up for like an hour by now and when you reach for your pen it's got not any more folks the pen tool i'm telling you in fact i was wearing my pen tool when i had that last train of thought about the called ten sightings of a wild creature at large in our fair city one spring time cruising under the mall no helmet this once no hair tie hair flying in bare thought is blurred along the river eaten green lights for dinner or leap in potholes not stop until the top of the point street bridge my one stop sign the full moon tomorrow will plant roots to some kind of boy girl biking to the farm at dawn strong arms long legs i got a shovel a rake muscles where muscles should be hair where hair grows and only the grass knows what's up my skirt through the peeping grass it licks my calves with do three or after work only the sea can hold this naked body only a fire on the beach i let the heat hand five summer time the asphalt so hot skillet skitter across like a drop of water but the grass at noon is cool give me a snack a quick nap and i can work well past the rise of the moon six if indeed happiness can be eaten it is straight off the vine salted with the sweat around my lips it's a bite with some grit happiness that fa carrot i wipe off on my jeans seven or happiness must be stopped like prey and caught that way wild and chased and held between the teeth it usually escapes but when i catch it it's a feast eight gentle now gentle with the pregnant earth fingers slip into the dirt over and over and of october garlic breath is sexy when dragon puff visible in the chill astonishing still this brave green tip pricked with snow coming nine finally now arms deep in the leaf pile sweet trial load after load spread thick and steaming over the rose the way a lover pulls the blanket up over her beloved before they sleep ten full moon cruisin home through city streets climbing alone into cold sheets finding heat being in heat i have longed for the touch of a  you i've got i've got a great tools but this one's my favorite maybe because it forms a sort of bridge between my two favorite selves the farmer and the writer i've thought a lot about that first quote i put up about the kinship between farming and art because it makes a lot of sense to me that's our chance to work hard creatively and produce something better good if you're interviewed it i happily spend hours alone at my desk writing a poem or alone in the field planting salad and then also both farming and writing especially spoken word have the bonus of eventually connecting me again with other people i emerge from the solitary work to sell salad to my neighbors at the market or to read my poems in front of a room full of people and either way we all feel fed afterwards mind fit or body fat or heart fit so the word loom is so it seems ordering time and the word heirloom is everywhere in the catalogs heirloom beans heirloom squash and i know what that means open open  pollinated varieties from before the age of hybrids and i know how it feels too because i have lots of seeds of conceiving since i started or seeds i've inherited from other farmers that first sack of maine garlic john gave us when i said we were starting out or the sweet red and white striped tomato katie gave me one august afternoon when summer was still that favorite aunt spoiling us with gifts we spawned out the pope and save the seeds on dry them out on newspaper and that like crazy all summer long a real gem so heirloom yeah i know what that means but i looked it up in the dictionary anyway because most words have more meanings in them than you realize so i is one who inherits property or a title or and here's where it gets kind of poetic a legacy loom is originally a tool utensil so now i'm some kind of inherited tool now some people probably inherit actual tools their grandpa's hunting knife or the bribe fork mom used in the garden and then there's the royal heir of prince say who's this inheritance if it's a tool utensil at all is probably the proverbial silver spoon but  true inheritance is the title to be eventually king me i'm a first generation farmer my parents are schoolteachers and i grew up in a city so there's no useful to know land or useful tools to pass down in my family  of course there's my bulletin into my blown into privilege the middle class existence that allowed me to get a college degree in the meantime realize i'd rather be outside oversight in my poems at a bar this privilege along with my native english and white skin are heirlooms particularly palpable in the city growing food in the city where there's scores of recent immigrants who are farmers back home and who grow amazing food in community gardens and vacant lots around providence but don't have as easy access to the customers and chefs that i've gotten to by talking these are the privileges that allow me to do the work i do are an inheritance that troubles me but tucked inside the word heirloom is an idea bigger than property or privilege is that third kind of air the air of a legacy because as farmers we're not just stewards of the land we're stewards of a culture a counter culture i daresay and agriculture in the cold face of agribusiness and as artists to where heirs to something old and human especially in the spoken word for my mentor farmers in the field and from my dearest poets i've inherited converging legacies the legacy of growing food on a human scale the legacy of the oral tradition a reverence for nature a reverence for beauty these two legacies have long been intertwined it goes way back to when domesticated plants and animals first allowed previously nomadic peoples to stay put and they started cumulating beautiful goods and improve their craft so when i turn my farm into a classroom when there are twenty kindergartners squealing around my worm been as i plop knots of red worms into their fat little hands or when i host the youth poetry slam and i see a high school student read her own poem into the microphone for the first time that i think is my heirloom alive alive before me of course sometimes i have to be realistic my two favorite things to do are grow vegetables and write poems so obviously there's not going to be a lot of fancy stuff left over when i die my limbs are alive i say and then it's time to pay my rent and capitalism comes crashing back to interrupt this past or a version of myself what do you do as the dental hygienist pulling a little mirror out of my mouth and i have to decide whether she's asking what i do for passion or for cash so i choose dot dot dot and you know writer like stories stories yes they and poems and we both know that either i'm really good or i have a trust fund or there's something i'm not telling her so i explained that i also wait tables a couple nights a week and do other odd jobs and thus become intelligible she asked me what restaurant i work at and i tell her and she says i want to have a valentine's day last year and then she goes back to cleaning my teeth which by the way is not all of who she is but it's what she does what do you do a terrible question for any of us trying to do what we love but subject still to the schizo phrenic nature of subsistence in this economy i wish i had a business card because they seem so convenient what do you do oh here let me give you my card but i don't know what i'd put on a business card because they're so small instead of a business card i need like a business cube so i have six sides for everything i do to make ends meet if you like employ urban farmer and spoken word poet storyteller say waitress them an s c t tutor i got a secret sourdough bread business sometimes i'm alive model for a local drawing class business cube my next great invention because farmers and artists were always hustling city farmers definitely and country farmers to especially us farmers who don't use chemicals because it's hard to make a living just selling vegetables or milk or meat so maybe you also sell salsas or jams or you teach workshops at your farm or you've got a corn maze or bed and breakfast or a bunch of antiques for sale in your barn it's an art this life a practical art to make farmer what you do and to make a living too it's not prepackaged that's for sure it's a life built from scratch it's a quilt sewing from scraps but that quilt that's your heirloom that's your legacy i really believe that the legacy that we make that we build when we make possible a life where we feed ourselves and our neighbors where we express ourselves and appreciate each other's self expression because if it's up to months santo and dow well i'll just be clocking in and clocking out there's no poetry slams or farm stands in the corporate business plan no we've got to protect our heirlooms really protect them and pass them on last month in mexico farmers staged a hunger strike in defense of their scorn a hunger strike to protest the chemical companies months santo dow and d trying to get permission to plant millions of acres of g m o corn in northern mexico one of the farmers came on the radio and said i believe that the only relation we have the grow as the growers have with mother earth of the natural sea we have to remember that mexico has sixty distinct varieties of corn that we've cultivated over the last ten thousand years and with this we have fed the world it was a struggle for the life and health of our country now that's heirloom at its most complex  the seeds yes but also the legacy and the session of peasant power in the face of assertion of peasant power and its locus in the seed and assertion of local power in the face of colonial greed c heritage literally passed from one generation to the next and maybe here in new england we are now on hunger strike to protect our steeds yet but we but we each are preserving a heritage on our own farms in our own ways either through saving see rich soil or good practices good tools and good stories now i'm pretty young i don't have my own house the only thing i drive is my bike but all this talk of heirlooms has me so between my farm and my pen i'm i'm feeling rich and i did what all rich people do i wrote down what's going to what should happen to my crap when i die and that's the poem i'm going to leave you with today it's called  first draft of my last will and testament i like brown the boy being of run during mind and sweat salted body being still young enough that my own death is some distant country you have heard of but never seen being never the less familiar with the still stiff body of an old chicken on the coop floor one morning and having the following spring sifted its little skull from the compost and through that small death being somehow more at home with the with the idea of my own do hereby make publish and declare this to be my first draft of my last will and testament to my heirs mind by blood or friendship or vocation to you fellow stewards of the land you fellow poets you humans who hunger you humans who love to my heirs there are no jewels but if one cold morning when i am gone you are in the garden after a frost and from the curled fist of a leaf of kale rolls a perfect pearl of ice to your poem this is your heirloom there probably won't be royalties but if one day like a patient thief you are standing before the padlock safe of your heart twirling and twirling the lock when suddenly all the cylinders drop into place and you found the code to open it and there inside are all your poems waiting to be written this too is heirloom and finally to my heirs you artists of living you who are always crouching and standing up i leave my