world. a body of continents and stars. on an airplane i look at the map. flights intersect. travel miles and seas, hours and clouds, a window bird trills by my bed. power lines crisscross streets like threads in the sky. a book of lives is a month of saturdays, a sea-- seahorse from per ru, perfume at my neck. look inside a red suitcase. you'll find letters to no one, objects found and lost, a plastic white fan, contradictory j. -- jade green, city grids, the last bite of an ice cream cone. these are all my names. i savor these words on the tip of my tongue. a book of lives lived in my right hand. i caught your pen in the other.

all the rivers flower into the sea. thank you. [cheers and applause] >> next up is -- next up is marcela ortiz. >> ok. this is the first time i'm reading in front of people. ok. all right. this is a poem to my mom. you're nothing but a group of coffee klatching women. 19 years and the only image that i can think of what i hearl my mother's voice is rosie the riveter with her hand balled up in a fist and her hand underneath her face. coffee klatching women? a bunch of old grandmothers who sit in sewing sirgles and talk

about the best blueberry circles. we banned my mother from the kitchenen -- because of an incident where she had burnt water the the only person who cooked was my father. please keep your peace, mom. yes, my mother say woman but coffee klatching? the term was worse than nails on the chalk board. oh, yes, a coffee klatching woman who has raised three children and never taking shying from anyone. you sure do act like a coffee klatching women with your boots and jeans on, arriving to run a crew of obnoxious men's, because 50% of the men's brains skiptd -- consist of their oh

so glorified junk which doesn't even work right. most of the time. coffee klatching women? sitting around talking nonsense? the same nonsense that finally changed the 19th amendment. yes we can vote. i can see abigail adams sitting and clutching her scorching hot cup of joe, john adams saying sit down and drink your damn coffee, woman. she really was the brains of the outfit. my mother is overworked, tired, but her still solid body stood hard as a rock. i'm not going to cry, as a tear falls down from her face. don't cry, mom, don't cry. [cheers and applause]

>> that was her first time ever. yay! and up next we have indiana telepenova. >> a recipe for water. start with the color magenta, a burning asphalt, of beach ball sighing out its life, a garden grown on accident after accident, add a father painting shelves on the cove, a pinch of guilt, statues of isabella butter flisse -- butterflies, and extinct alpha betts, a teaspoon of autumn leaves, a shepard playing with the winds,

some animal begging for snow. mix vigorously like the mountain mixes up its slopes. preheat the bed of a star to -- 240 light-years away. thank you. and next is -- [cheers and applause] >> next is robin black. >> hi, robin! >> oh, ok. i had to know. this is called "eviction notice." the police turned us away. 11 years old eating baby food. days warm like the occasional free matsoff from next door. no plates the cups were

yoplaits. i stepped on a nail taking my sister through the yard the drinking from beer bottles that tasted like warm quarters the i caught fleas from cookie puss sleeping on my stomk keeping us both warms. at that age i lost the comfort from lies. stranded on a crescent move, floating in a sea of ash littered with diamonds the i swallowed past lives to spit these alternate futures. >> one more big round of applause for our very talented apprentice program. apprentice program. fantastic.

[horns honking] announcer: big dreams and good grades aren't enough to get into college. there are actual steps you need to take. finding someone who can help is the first and most important. for the next steps, go to knowhow2go.org.

good even and welcome. jack hirschman. he has been a poet in san francisco from 2006. his powerful voice set the tone, his latest book, "all that's left". >> my voice is a little untuned. very simply so they are not any question of anxiety or worry. on march 14th, i decided to

take an operation on my carotted artery and therefore. i don't want to go out by a stroke. i would rather go out another way. the operation was perfectly senseful. there wasn't pain. they put a tube down your throat. so i lost my voice for a month or 2. therefore, i ask your indulgence. i will read in this voice, if you don't mind.

i am very pleased this book came out. i am going to read with the war. the war drug on. die after die. so shares and shout so jibes, nor many a steer of so cult exist and jams, juice, gins over in his tomb. tears over borrowed good as well. and future is dust and

smothering. the war i rock is a masked, sad gem stone of war kings and people. and fear must without heaven, over a toga pot. that's import that war boil. that's bile that gag or jail roomy and oath and the war is cocked. air and fuel the plague and watch him of his hunter of ash guard down the stinking hole.

they were shacked up from to be done. >> [applause]. >> this house of hunger, for the american kids who go to sleep each night without supper. this house of hunger has millions of kids in it. breakfast and lunch is all their worth. famished of billions of bucks in them. what pretty prophets have set before king's death. they stink with the stench of unmitigated treaty. their indifference included in

their digital speeds. while those kids lie in bed without a cup of bullion in their head. also kill the children, american you shootful. and the murders you plant in your own backyard. keep insisting your democracy. but in the starving darkness, those sad, lost eyes know the truths of your lies that you sold all the marbles in their little sacks to the bullies who applaud because they won't give them back. you have stolen the bread that cried from their mouths and

turned it into dirty dough. when finally they manage to fall asleep, their dreams cause you the haunted house. the spell of the sun to burn you down so that greeds flee and steal the good things for hungry little bellies to eat. between the page, with the heart and the mind, wrestling upon it. and the year which later will receive those limbs of light as perfect harmony. there's a stillness who's

volume speaks word of words defiant. treasures of the unstable. secrets of the heavy enchantment and the never ending gathering at the lips of the kiss of poem. now, >> [applause]. >> now, i understand them causing an enormous amount of anguish of my voice. i brought my girlfriend. she is going to read 3 poems to you so you get another

dimention of my voice. please welcome, agnes ford >> the house of the setting sun. the comrade again and the poorist way wave you. to the red flag. i put my mount to your misery new orleans. here, war lies piles so high. this floating prison of a cementary cries of range. this delta lies on its side. rows and rows upon it's own government and crushed. summertime is over and the living is dead.

and around midnight all hopes are looted. no one will ever come clean of the katrina of the new orleans and the stinking house of the setting sun. but it's the black and the blue of the loving on the shoes, let alone a dime or water, america, you are always scotched earth in our mouth. always a rain of disaster of streams of our broken eyes. now the rags are the most turn. our pores the poorest that can be worn in the souls shop.

now that all is lost and there is only nothing to lose. long live the courage and the poor. they begin to waiver. [applause]. >> vennetia. i was enranged at your body enettia. chicanery that cried out of an awfulor gast. slowly i found you should side streets where you practice a strolling stillness without any engine sounds and the skies

turning on into color and then eternal magnificence of twilight, it accompanies your every move and theirs doubt about it, you are more adorable without the car wrapped around you, where you can be what you are. walking water. that gently laps. i have come to you this midnight and lane down in your black body with it's soft red blush and pulled the starkly blue cover over a cheek or moon blushing through the midst. and the final for me.

juna. that's juna bomb. that she lived on board avenue. 3 blocks away from the street isn't bronx i grew up on. just what are you getting out june abonus, that an alphabet, i would be visiting on a masterpiece and writing a bistro of poems. scones. 47 years later. she has long since ash, the world has become unmitigated cash. a woman gazing into the face of a cell phone. i gave me lover a cherry and

lived on. endure these bitter hips and hot heads and the empty collapse. night will still holdup after all these years. summer snap. >> virginia tech. the loner is here. the one who stopped listening. the one with the hidden fuse. with the fist. with the hole in his heart. with the cool guns, the one who blasts away. who kills just because.

who kills as well because there's nothing left but the dead. kills himself. suicide on top of all these kills and now you know, what a mar gin in old baghdad in the wrong place at the wrong time why you're mourning is going in one ear of the deaf tomorrow. and out the deafening utter. air cane. one, the sorrow these many months isn't because

celebrities put eyes all over my body as i was in the u.s. again. not the other america. it comes from the footprint of a kick stab in my back. got riding a bus to a reading with some really destitute brothers and sisters in a 16, 3 office space. i am sitting in the rear of the bus reading a translation of the book of the concealed mystery. my eyes are risen from a black woman standing and talking on her cell phone. i voice decibeled, latino black and white workers.

when i arrive, i accidentally grace her sleeve with an excuse me. she pushed me. shouts don't touch me with hate red and what the hell do you think you did to me. the eyes coiled and in denial or at once and set to spring. when my shoulders i bear a gentle but insistent arms and turning from a black man, you don't want to go here. here's your stop. he leads me to the stair well, but no sooner do i begin

descending when i feel myself hurtled down my a kick to my back falling and landing up a level on my feet as the door closes with a snicker and the bus pulls away. from my amazement what they do, the latina asks in startled urgency on the sidewalk. and home wards make me realize, i am 72. for the first time in my life. 2. one could i suppose chaplin it a way. how for no reason suddenly one is popped or clobbered with the cane. kicked in the ass for a slap

stick for silence. but it just happens, humiliation sounds very depth. just happens, a wound knows no depth of time and not so random is the karma of lungs breezing arkayicly. i didn't know the volatility of the hatred, i could only think dike. but if you prophecy be true that it will be reasoned. and reasoned must find it's violence in order to be for

violence is the memory a horror carried by the soul of the blood to sect. she, a violent of resistance is also a violence for, if she said or of me. why not take all of me and shove it up your ass because you can just about sit with your lips. because i am inside you now in violation of you and are american filthy crumb of a loaf of people. i am here and everywhere. no matter how hold you will

always be the snot nosed with the shame spread over your brains from a rumble doubt of gang bang wooden zips where the real thing went down on haight then ran in torn threads of a dead dawn to bring hot rolls and milk to 2 kids in a dump near palieu. 3, chalk it up like the gutters and walls of our breaths. between tilted ties singing the day is night and the night

moves inside this long, lonesome bread of glues. don't climb to the top. you can fall in and we'll never again find you. so many come at the midnight taint. paint the world where the sunshine aid ain't. go back to what beginning? a serial suck. a kick in the butt. oh, derelict devil in this hell's night. stay carton. be full of disstress. you can pull the race are