Hey, great to see you all here.
Thank you again, poets for being here with me today.
And I'm hoping Nicole, if you can start us off.
And then we'll have Hanif read, and then John.
And we'll just continue in that rotation, if that seems good.
Sounds good.
Thank you so much, Diana.
And thank you to the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Thank you to Dwyane and Tyler Meier.
All the crew and to co-readers.
I'll first start by reading a couple excerpts
from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.
I'll read the erasure first, and then tell you a bit about it.
Here goes.
Pages 1 to 14.
Excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.
We call out as in we neigh.
Heart reflex, heart reason, heart particular urge.
We are innocent as summer.
As children in the park.
As the short form of a name belted out by the bereaved.
Our living pending this single instance.
Records show we attempted to make the most of our bones
by controlling our bite.
For which we are more likely to be found guilty.
We could hear the impact, an act written for the stage.
We heard blood echoing, increasing in volume,
increasing in reach.
The forecast red, the city red, diminishing
to the proportion of red.
Whatever it will be, may be target practice.
We pile into night like men at a bus stop.
So those are a few pages from The Ferguson Report:
An Erasure.
As we know, an erasure is a found poem.
One created by erasing an existing document.
That document being, for this project, the Ferguson Report.
The Department of Justice's 100 plus page investigative
report on biased policing and court practices
in Ferguson, Missouri.
And the impetus for this report was the fatal shooting
of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black man
by a white police officer, Darren Wilson.
And so, that's what I'm erasing.
And those are just two excerpts.
I believe I said they were pages 1 to 14, but the pages I read
were 1 to 4 and 9 to 14.
So I'll do a bit of jumping throughout this reading
back and forth.