WEBVTT

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What I do now as a lawyer is, I
help to run a program called Su

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Clínica Legal.

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Su Clínica Legal is a legal
services program for low-income

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tenants in Chelsea,
Massachusetts.

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Chelsea is a tough little town,
right across the Tobin Bridge

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from Boston.

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It is the poorest
town in Massachusetts.

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And it's about 40% Latino now--

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Puerto Rican, Dominican,
Salvadoran, Guatemalan--

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and requires a lot of
Spanish-speaking legal

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services, in the housing area.

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One night, I couldn't sleep.

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I was thinking about
the clients, people

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who had passed
through my office,

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have passed through
that courthouse.

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And I wrote the
following poem, which

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is the controversial
title poem of the book

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that Norton is going
to publish next year.

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It's called "City of Coughing
and Dead Radiators, Chelsea,

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Massachusetts."

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"I cannot evict them
from my insomniac nights,

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tenants in the city of
coughing and dead radiators.

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They bang the radiators
like cold, hollow marimbas.

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They cry out to unseen creatures
skittering across their feet

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in darkness.

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They fold hands over plates
to protect food from ceilings

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black with roaches.

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And they answer the
call of the list.

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All evictions in
court, brays the clerk.

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Quiet and dutiful
as spectral troops

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returning, they file
into the courtroom,

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crowding the gallery.

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The patient one from El
Salvador, shoemakers union

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refugee, slapping
his neck to show

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where that vampire
of an army bullet

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pierced his uncle's windpipe.

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The red haired woman with no
electricity but the drugs heat,

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swimming in the pools of
her blue bruises, white skin

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as the candle she
lives by, who will

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move this afternoon for $100.

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The prostitute swollen
with pregnancy and sobbing,

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as the landlady sneers
miscarriage before a judge

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poking his broken hearing aid.

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The girls surrounded by a
pleading carousel of children,

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in Spanish bewilderment,
sleepless and rat

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vigilant, who wins
reluctant extermination,

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but loses the youngest,
lead paint retarded.

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The man, alcohol-puffed,
graph of scars stretching

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across his belly, locked
out, shirt stolen,

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arrested at the
hearing for the rampage

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of his detox hallucinations.

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The Guatemalan boy, who
listens through the wall

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for his father's landlord
defiant staccato,

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jolted awake by flashes
of the landlord floating

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over the bed, parade balloon
waving a kitchen knife.

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For all those sprawl
downstairs with the work

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boots crusted map
printed on the back,

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the creases of the judge's
face collapse into a fist.

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As we shut files and
click briefcases to leave,

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a loud faced man trumpets
from the gallery.

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Death to legal aid."

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Well, there's a
happy little poem.

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A joyous poem for
the holiday season.

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I am available for children's
parties, by the way.

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[LAUGHTER]

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