All right.
So tonight, I'm going to be sharing some work out
of my most recent book Inside Me An Island.
And if I had to describe what this book embodies for me,
it's really about an exchange of landscape.
I would describe it as the exchange
of geographic landscapes of a queer islander, migrant person,
and the psychological landscape of queer belonging.
And so in the spirit of exchange,
I would like to exchange some things with you.
That means you gotta give me something to, OK?
So I'm going to share some poetry with you.
But I would invite you to choose the order in which I
share those poems.
Thanks to a generous gift by the Poetry Center.
They gave me this basket.
They don't know that yet.
This basket is in the beautifully appointed poet's
cottage that I'm staying in.
And I thought that it needed to have some energy around it.
So I brought it here.
Inside this basket is potential.
You can choose a poem.
You can choose a story.
And I will share it with you.
But I ask one thing in exchange.
If you come to choose what I will give to you,
I ask at the minimum that you read
what you choose into this microphone,
so we can share it with everybody.
And then I ask you to take a daring chance
and share a physical intimacy with me in some way.
It's not that salacious.
Do what is consensually comfortable for you.
If you would like to pat me on the shoulder, that's fine.
If you want to massage my shoulders
while I read the poem, that would be excellent.
If you would like an embrace, I'm open to that.
Platonic kisses only should you dare.
But then if you choose to exchange something physically
intimate with me, I'd like to talk about it
real quick before we do it.
So I won't put you on the spot and say, OK,
what are we going to do?
We'll come over here and then we'll do the intimate thing.
All right?
Does this sound amenable to everyone?
Sure.
It's something I actually just heard I guess.
And maybe I will preface it with this.
The reason why I'm interested in this experiment.
I haven't done this before.
I do other versions of this.
But we create these imaginary borders between us, right?
Some are really simple, and some are really complex.
And they all have some form of consequence.
So just by me being up here in this position of hierarchy,
I will say.
You are seated not looking at each other.
Because you're facing me.
You don't even have to look at each other.
You're looking at me, and I'm going
to dispense some art to you and you will decide
whether that is good or not.
And that's one way.
It's not it's your moral way.
It is not in my experience, a typical indigenous way
of sharing of talking story.
And so I want to see if we can tweak that a little bit.
If it were up to me, we'd all be in a circle,
and I would be in that circle with you.
But this is a big room.
So I'm not going to blow people's minds
and ask you to move your chairs.
But I am asking you to at least interact with me in some way.
And it'll go how it goes.
If you choose a shitty poem, then I'm
going to read you a poem.
If you choose something mind bending,
we're going to thank you for it.
So the first person please who would like to hear some.
I'm a poetic jukebox.
So if you don't use something, I'm going to be quiet.
Oh, the pressure.
Please.
All of you.
Yeah.
Pick a good one.
I picked two.
You can read both and decide which ones do you want.
So you'll read into here, and I will
choose the poem that goes with.
Tell us your name.
My name is Tony.
Tell us a story about where you live now.
Oh, that's a long story, Tony.
That was a short story about where you live.
You can't take it back now.
All right.
So we're going to go over here.
This is OK.
Thank you.
I like that.
All right, Tony.
We can clap for Tony.
That was great.
Tell us a story about where you live now.
Jukebox number 101.
This is a long story, and it even has a prelude,
This is called Sonoma.
I live in Santa Rosa, California in the County of Sonoma.
And I moved there about seven years ago.
And when I first moved, I didn't know anybody.
I was moving to a new job.
I'd never been there before.
I thought Santa Rosa was a suburb of San Francisco.
It's not.
It is nothing like that.
But I was surprised to find that there
are some really lovely things about Sonoma
outside of its marijuana industry and wine industry.
One of those things is a body of water called Lake Sonoma.
So I read the prelude to you.
There's an epigraph.
Cultural Resource Studies in the Lake Sonoma area
began in 1964 when Adan Treganza, an archeologist
from San Francisco State College, and his small crew
surveyed the area for prehistoric sites.
Although several sites were found
during their brief recognizance, none
was judged important enough to warrant excavation.
Construction began on the Warm Springs Dam in 1967.
Praetzellis, Praetzellis, and Stewart.
Before Warm Springs Dam: The history
of the Lake Sonoma area, 1985.
I stuffed a sack with two days worth of warmth, food,
and light, and slid a slender boat
onto the waters of Lake Sonoma almost immediately
upon arriving at my new home in northern California.
I was alone.
Familiar with no one or nothing not yet comfortable
with the word Californian.
I had just driven 3,000 miles in a zagging
path across springtime America.
I was in love maybe with still healing
from physical and emotional trauma maybe,
and was definitely in dire need of myself.
For me, always there's some quality
of being adrift that serves to center.
To be afloat is to be at once in and out of control.
A condition in which one can drop
a plumb line of consciousness, into uncertain depths,
and test.
The tautness of adaptability, the sway
of emotional well-being.
To be from an island, yet to exist off island
is to continually reconcile the waters.
So I found a boat and a lake.
And I thought of the way the lake had come to be.
And the way of history that floods, and flushes out
those who would call the land at the bottom of the lake home.
And the stories and languages of those displaced people.
The Pomo, the Miwok, whose sacred sites
were drowned to make the place, where boats like mine
could float above on any given Wednesday and spring.
Which made me think of my own displacement,
and of being in maybe love too, which
is to say of living still and seeking happiness
still, and finding a new home in a land not my own
in the middle of the ache of being one who is displaced
and alone with myself.
On the banks of that flooded place,
I wrote the love letter, Sonoma.
The elegy Sonoma.
The maybe long poem Sonoma.
The floating words swirling in a canoe Sonoma for my brothers
and sisters adrift.
Sonoma is a long poem.
I shouldn't say that.
Sonoma is a poem that takes up many pages.
And some people would say that those pages
are filled with empty space.
But people from Oceania recognize
that space is full with water.
So there's many pages.
And the words on those pages at times look like islands.
Sonoma.
I will say golden and I will say turn light
I'll utter and also gulf.
Stubble you should know and shake
to the upward flick of sound you might swallow.
Water shadow, lichen, the nose of a swimming creature slick.
A nest on the slender creek, shirk, a slant dance.
There is a filling.
Folding soft, itch hollow trap.
I will say mudroom.
I will say breathe in a bowl crowned with leaves.
You will want to know clack and possibly slump.
But who can say?
Like as not you'll swoon bay crazy for olive.
Olive.
Who wouldn't want a word like that?
I could mutter gosling related.
It's true mirage.
So I will let you in on joist and sheet.
When is there not a surface?
Better I will say chord.
Aviary.
Slow hoof and this plush.
I have ears in my throat.
Loft.
You are humming, tell true.
I have ears.
I have ears in my throat, which is to say I will say slender,
unctuous, sway, and then pebbled vicious dram.
You will guess whisky and steel cup.
You will guess the time of day.
You might ask shoot.
I will say needle.
I will say pull, pull, pull, and slate wash sift.
You will ask for simple, simple.
I'll tell you a story.
People wish to contain a river, to slide in a wall
as if the banks were grooved, and push back a flowy river
as if to staunch a wound.
You're a tree on the bank.
And suddenly, the flood.
Now your branches are bare riddled with tapping.
Now, you are bleached and ghostly.
Submerged, shipwreck, your tongue soft roots.
You will ask for more.
I will say nutria or muskrat.
The slick nose.
I can divulge candle.
You will seem to me at feather.
I will croon.
I have ears in my throat.
Simple.
Push flume glass.
Plump quail.
Thorax swish wilt crisp antenna mints belt dilate.
Hone, harmonium, aplomb, click, scuttle, skip.
I'll tell you a story.
The night we met, we did not want each other.
That's what we said with our hands.
They cupped and shuffled, they rolled, and tapped.
Not we they said.
Not now.
No.
So we waited for the ice to shift glacial we.
You will ask for more.
Mad this more.
Mad is more.
Shadow of hand on pages more.
You might blink levered wings more.
Chitter, chitter lantern.
Yes, more.
I can now say pig.
It deserves more.
Pig.
But I can give you kettle.
Wool cheek the right weight.
I can say gristle and hatch filament.
Yes, it's true.
My dreams have ears.
You turn over eagle hysteria and wind.
Oh, the wind.
I will give you channel.
You pirouette in a satin bloom.
Simple.
You sideways and slip, bloom.
I will say root.
I will tell you a poem.
Glade.
I'm going to stop doing that poem.
Thank you.
I think you got the gist of where that was going.
It's a lot of words that I like to say.