I'm going to read a little bit from "RoseSunWater,"
which came out with The Operating
System during the pandemic.
And this is a book, in so many ways,
about gentrification, about losing my grandmother's home
to capitalism, to the gentrifying landscape
of the San Fernando Valley, which you would recognize
if I called Los Angeles, right?
But tonight it's not Los Angeles.
It's Van Nuys.
Van Nuys is the city where I was raised, it's the 818.
And I'm going to read to you a piece that means everything
to me because it is a piece of myth-making,
and this is called, "A Cenote Blossoms
in Van Nuys, California."
"A family of immigrants moves to the valley beyond the city.
The home they find is without any record of city planning,
and was built in 1906 when a train still
ran through this town.
This house becomes a home, this home
becomes a type of field or portal.
They plant fruit trees from seed,
twin aguacates from the Yucatan take two decades
to become a myth.
The children's children become a new distance.
The gardenias blossom and levitate.
The pitaya blossoms a palm tree to grow upon.
The lemon trees talk to one another through the night.
The oranges grow less sour with every handful
of salt buried beneath them.
New trees are planted.
Many spirits leave their bodies before these words are ever
written.
They live with us, and when you speak their names aloud,
they know you better.
The concrete virgen grows roses out of nothing
to watch over outside the kitchen.
The mulberry tree plants legends in the heart
of the nearby inhabitants before bowing, before the chainsaw.
Later a mango tree grows up to tell
the story of these mysterious berries that
had no name until Colorado dropped Mayataan words
into a somnambulist's ear.
Years later, this memory would come
across as orange in its summer atmosphere,
orange and creek sound, and so small.
The Chaya emerges to nourish the keeper de la huerta antes que
the house dissolves, and the somnambulist
calls the house a home, an orchard,
because the trees allowed them to blossom and become
this afterimage beyond the city.
The city becomes something else around the orchard.
The city begins to punch holes in everyone's memory,
demanding the inhabitants adapt to the ongoing evasion
of everywhere else, wanting to be where they are not.
A sickness that spread to the somnambulist,
the hunger for departure, thirsty for a transit fix.
All of it imaginary.
None of it real.
The veins of light that become asphalt by day
were a kind of comfort, now grown strange.
The truth is a spiral, an ongoing descent through cycles.
Each return to origin allows a further vertical distance
in memory.
I sow this now, to yours, as you read this
and we become cross stitched and bound to one another.
The city continues humming within the body
despite all the silence surrounding the somnambulist.
Our blood is always buzzing.
The house is going to be destroyed before this book is
ever finished.
There is nothing to do but bloom this net
of neurons and temporality.
And sometimes you have to rebuild the structures
within your body again, and again, and again, and again,
and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
I remember that I do not remember.
The rain comes down in thick brush strokes
of spectral pigments, piles of color growing thick
with movement.
The trees they dance, they twirl.
I build a house in the dead end housing complex of my heart.
The rent is cheap enough to live,
and every tenant is on a second chance account of some kind,
my heart included.
I tried to build the square footage into my organs.
I keep trying to form a floor-plan out of memory.
Every time I touched my hands to those walls, feet
to the floors, I am trying to remember a feeling
beyond the ruin to come.
There will be no pyramid, there will be no archive.
Our home will become the shape of an overpriced future
I can't afford.
And I hope every tenant's aguacates rot
before they can use them.
I build a roof above a dream I have yet to have.
The empty chairs, they manifest spirits, and ancestors,
and we're all moving out of here before it's too late."