| have a very young participant here
who is going to choose the last poem that I will share with you
and then I'll read it.
Pick a good one.
OK let me see what it says.
OK I'm going to look.
OK pick another one.
[LAUGHTER]
She didn't pick the one she wanted.
Like that one.
I think the first one was good, don't you?
Tell us your name.
Do you want to see it in the microphone?
OK.
Tell us your name.
My name is Betty Reyes.
I go at boarding school.
Dennehotso Boarding School is where I go in Dennehotso.
Betty you're awesome.
Do you think that I could give you
a small hug around the shoulder?
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
So believe it or not, the thing that Betty chose was a video.
And the slip of paper that she read
and not one that I picked for her said tell us some things
that you're working on right now.
So I'm going to share with you a brief video poem that I've
been working on for a project for the Smithsonian Asian
Pacific American Center called A Day in the Queer Life.
And there are 12 video poems representative of queer Asian
or Pacific Islanders.
The project is designed to give us visibility
and to give us the opportunity to tell our own stories
about how are you doing.
It's a check in.
What is it like to be queer and you today.
All of the footage in these videos
these films that we produce are taken by us.
So everything that you see is probably from my iPhone.
And then there's a story that goes over.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I think it comes on in a second.
No, but should it be on right now.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
A measurement of width and without.
The ecstatic penetration of sperm into egg.
Current I consider we are made almost entirely
of water and electricity.
So our vernacular of emotion employs surge, wave, spark,
impulse and current, the flood of salt or rush
of crackling blue pulse of irking rivulet.
A measurement of width and without.
The ecstatic penetration of sperm into egg.
We have all seen the microscopic iconography.
The womb-less state will ordain this.
The electric moment of life will brand
each womb sanctified property.
My mother was conceived during a war waged on Brown bodies
and birthed me under a moon obscured by flags.
Electric layers of ocean reveal themselves
as an ancestral coding of me and her, and her,
and her as this spear and the plunge.
The cavern of hand prints, the caverns of decapitation.
The lightning spark cannot be created because it was already
there.
In the gloam, human nostalgia presses to know where,
when, which God's touch the first impulse of light into
darkness.
First enacted a separation of shadow into meaning,
yet I fork, bead, ribbon the light into existence,
insistence with each sloughing of salt water blood each
recollection of current.
Current tunnel each or more.
Our people were shaped from stone and the pulsing sea.
Sisters crouched body wave needed
salt lapped until we tumbled from her, of her, of them.
All strong, strong and hold together.
Birds regarded our sea foam anklets,
our slippery ropes of hair.
Our cheeks full of pebbles and scattered
from the shore singing.
We opened our new mouths to our own chorus crooning
sister, brother.
We are sun, moon, sky, water, Earth, all siblings.
Current.
I believe in reincarnation and so much
as I know an ancestor passed to me the memory of making oneself
into a universe.
One self current connected to no.
Concurrent with every iteration of subatomic movement.
How then am I queer, queer, queered?
I am also only queer because there
is a world outside of mine.
If the world were only me I would seem just so.
A micro-cosmos of animal, mineral, plant, light,
electric I, current, yet the world.
Here is what I can say, I am I. Warrior
I, glacier I, photon I, vine I, rivulet I, integer I,
summoner I.
Wave I, exhalation I, mother I, lava I. Hilum I,
hyphen I, I, I, current.
Prism I and culture bending through me.
The world spits, grapples, tries to tie me up
in basements to rid themselves of my insistence.
Ancestor wired me a path within.
Inside the brick spaces throughout and becoming
the walls and clouds, I swallow bolts.
I expand, I empty, I carry within a hundred thousand wombs
of spectacular light.
[END PLAYBACK]