Sabbir: Mommy.
Sabbir: Aparnai bukni che.
Sabbir: A Pernani book… Yay.
Sabbir: I don't, but…
Sabbir: We haven't… I haven't want anything happening.
Sanaa: Dad, you just have to mute yourself.
Sabbir: Okay, but then, why isn't anything happening?
Sanaa: And then thank Amur still has to join the meeting, so just….
Sabbir: Okay, I just muted.
Sabbir: Dana.
Sabbir: Donna, is it happening?
Sanaa: Yes, Dad, it'll take some time.
Sanaa: One minute.
Sabbir: Okay, fine.
Sanaa: Just turn yourself off and just wait for it to start.
Sabbir: Okay How do you like my shirt?
Sanjay’s iPhone: There you go.
Amar Paul: It's not better. It's not better. It's not better. It's not better.
Amar Paul: Can we put that behind me, or behind the scenes?
Amar Paul: No. It's not better.
Amar Paul: Can you say something off with that room?
Amar Paul: Thank you.
Amar Paul: Yeah, yeah, it's on. Okay, we're gonna get started in, like, 7 minutes, but please feel free to take a seat. I know that there aren't enough seats for everyone, so also you can sit on this rug. It's a Maraite rug. Everyone say thank you, Mara.
Amar Paul: Yeah, these rugs, cushions, you can stand along the walls around the back, and we'll get started in 7 minutes. Okay.
Amar Paul: Never mind. Sorry, the bycaster.
Amar Paul: Hey everybody, to look at the response.
Amar Paul: Yes.
Amar Paul: Next, I'll let me introduce her.
Amar Paul: I think so.
Amar Paul: Okay.
Amar Paul: Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna go ahead and get started. I can't believe that all of you are here. It's so exciting!
Amar Paul: One thing that I've really been working on recently is deep breathing. So, if we take, like, two deep breaths together, it's like, it's 4 beats in, 4 beats holding, 6 beats out.
Amar Paul: bang.
Amar Paul: Okay, nice. We were probably all counting in different spaces. Okay, the first thing… wow, what? I didn't write anything here.
Amar Paul: At 7, the event starts, opening should be all… Okay, so I guess you're just gonna wing it. My book came out on Tuesday.
Amar Paul: came out with Game Over Books, which is a local press. It's carried in local bookstores, like Narinate and Just Bookish, and it really is a product of all of my time in… as a member of the community here… as a member of the poetry community here in Boston and New England, and it could not exist without the works of all of those poets. So, I… I don't know, I'm really excited for tonight to also be
Amar Paul: celebrating all of those poets as well. So we have a really great lineup of, several readers who will be performing poetry for you, and then I will be reading a set from my book as well. My book is available for purchase at the back there. There's Miles, who will be selling books. Awesome, amazing. Miles also, …
Amar Paul: Miles has always put litter on my face before poetry slams, and today was no different, because I was up here, and then Miles was like.
Amar Paul: And created a cheese shade that matches the cover of my book, yeah.
Amar Paul: Okay, the readers we have for you… what do I have to say? Oh yeah, books for sale? Oh yeah, books are for sale. I also have zines for sale that are sliding scale, 1 to 5, dollar in donation. All donations will go to the Samira Project for, rebuilding and helping people in Gaza return home.
Amar Paul: And Amy Arthentar also has merchant out for sale, I believe, and all of the payment info is back there on that table.
Amar Paul: Okay, the readers that you're going to hear for from tonight, you should give one really crisp whoop after each of their names, I'm going to read them, and then you'll actually give them, like, very full, raucous rounds of applause when they come up to stage. But the readers that you'll be hearing from tonight are McKenney Fils-A-May.
Amar Paul: Amy Argentar, and Miles Taylor.
Amar Paul: Okay, without further ado, because we're kind of, kind of running, kind of running late, …
Amar Paul: Sorry, another thing that I was supposed to say just now is that you should remember to register to vote, because local elections are coming up. Okay, I'll say more about that later.
Amar Paul: Instead, right now, we will start moving into poetry, and then I'll intersperse more announcing throughout. That feels right.
Amar Paul: …
Amar Paul: Okay, is there anything else that anybody needs to know? Anything about the activities? There's cake eventually? Okay, yeah, cool. We're gonna, we're gonna go ahead and get started. You guys ready for some poems? Yeah.
Amar Paul: All right.
Amar Paul: First, first on the mic. McKenney Fils-A-May is a New England-based Haitian-American poet, organizer, and teaching artist.
Amar Paul: He has received fellowships from Palau, Pave Hanum, The Watering Hole, and Terrorless. Over the span of nearly two decades, McKenney has represented New England in several regional and national poetry slams, making numerous semifinal and final stage appearances.
Amar Paul: McKenney's work has been featured, or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, A Droid Obsidian, Academy of American Poets Poem A Day series, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection will be published by Yes Yes Books in 2026. Please give it up for McKenney!
Amar Paul: That's how we do, how we do it, how we do it.
Amar Paul: Whoa.
Amar Paul: Like, I'm so honored to be part of this event. I'm such a big fan of Arna's work, and human, and I'm really happy that we all came out to celebrate her in this project.
Amar Paul: I'm gonna read some poems, and then I'm gonna go sit down and enjoy the rest of this beautiful show.
Amar Paul: So… I'm working on a poetry collection about Haitian superstitions, so I'm gonna write, superstition.
Amar Paul: It's called Unsupercisions.
Amar Paul: I was raised reading a Bible of conditional statements.
Amar Paul: And sometimes a good book.
Amar Paul: Before bed, mom recited Proverbs.
Amar Paul: If you play with your shadow, Then it will eat you.
Amar Paul: But I never did believe her. Clicked the switch after she turned the lights off and left, my flashlight beaming in oak across my bedroom wall, my fingers bending and twisting into black foxes that had kicked into my room.
Amar Paul: I didn't play with my shadows.
Amar Paul: I mean, theater of skepticism and let them star in the show but once.
Amar Paul: Half awake, I caught them scaling the wall, stretching into a mom. I feared becoming their meal and screamed for mom.
Amar Paul: What did I tell them?
Amar Paul: I stopped playing with my shadows, and started ignoring the pastor when he calls superstitions the devil's problems.
Amar Paul: I still believe in God, but also my God.
Amar Paul: My Bible, a game of telephone that first rang across the ocean, or inside a sugarcane field, or in the silt air after a hurricane. My Bible, an insurance policy against what God won't cover. My Bible, an instruction manual on how to collar the uncontrollable and teach it to come running when I called its name.
Amar Paul: Hi, Eden.
Amar Paul: There's a teacup Oop.
Amar Paul: Bilingual.
Amar Paul: There's a video of a teacup breaking in reverse.
Amar Paul: It's fractured pieces drawn back into place like a ghost solving a jigsaw.
Amar Paul: Too bad we can't push the rewind button on a lost language.
Amar Paul: Can we write an alphabet on the chop-brushed blackboard of erasure?
Amar Paul: Best we can do is fill in the fissures of our vernacular and smooth out the chipping.
Amar Paul: Listen.
Amar Paul: Pay your teachers no mind when they say, we seek broken French.
Amar Paul: They've never had to reassemble the remnants of their mother tongues after mourning the remnants of their mothers. They don't know that Creole is a Katsuki.
Amar Paul: When the Buccaneers dropped our dialect against IET shores, we pieced it back together with whatever was left lying around. Now, each time we open the china drawer of our mouths, there's copper more than anything else. So what?
Amar Paul: If our teacups weren't glued with gold, don't they still shimmer in the light?
Amar Paul: Don't be so cold water.
Amar Paul: Can't you still press 1 to your lips and drink?
Amar Paul: So, a lot of people in this room know, but… because I, you know, I've been working on different, like, books and whatnot, I'm working on a series of poems about, a shapeshifter called the Lugao. It's a part of Haitian culture. It's kind of like a werewolf, but, like, just scarier, in my opinion. And, like, honestly, just, like.
Amar Paul: the most terrifying shit from my childhood, and so I'm like, let me… let me revisit this shapeshifter, and let me… let me see if I can use that as a vehicle to talk about identity and erasure and…
Amar Paul: colonialism, and all these other things. And so I'm working on a project about the Luca, where I write persona poems, and then I write poems outside of the persona, and so I'm going to read a couple of poems from that.
Amar Paul: Alright, so, this is called… The Lugawa discusses privilege.
Amar Paul: I was always a portal for other creatures.
Amar Paul: even before agreeing to the Bocos Act.
Amar Paul: Now, I am my own muse.
Amar Paul: Choose which shape I want. Craft a schedule of spirit swallowing around convenience. Sometimes, shielding means stealing a baby into the never-to-be-seen again.
Amar Paul: Or watching a man struggle to keep his last breath, and writing my name over the doctor's diagnosis in invisible me.
Amar Paul: What I wouldn't give to no longer worry about my skin salted by a vengeful villager, or hidden from me until after sunrise. Strange how my inhumane passes for human more than I ever did, but I still called myself pure.
Amar Paul: Bloom.
Amar Paul: You wouldn't understand.
Amar Paul: You crack, and there is blood. I crack, and you see black and fake. Look at all this space, then fill it with so much imagination that I no longer have room to breathe. Of course, I had to change my shape.
Amar Paul: Under moonlight, I throw flowers on the grave of the human form, bend myself feral.
Amar Paul: I know you love writing books about everything interesting but yourself, so call me a compendium of carnivores, a consumption grimoire. I dare you.
Amar Paul: to read.
Amar Paul: Oof!
Amar Paul: Michael Jackson was a mug out. And no one could tell me otherwise. At 8 years old, sitting in the dark of my family's living room, on the border of bedtime, I watched his lover escape into a movie theater from a zombie-faced Michael.
Amar Paul: Who terror could hike like that? Could spin and lean into an acute angle, bullying gravity. Could command a group of the undead into mimic.
Amar Paul: If you ask me, he was a mirror image of the silhouettes that called out to my mother in her dreams, shared with shadow-piercing flaxed eyes, asking her to come close and share the details of our lives.
Amar Paul: Her dreams, never dreams, but instruments, hungry to play our death mounds. Or, he was like the man in the grocery store, whose smile peeled away like the first skin when he pushed my cousin onto the freezer aisle floor, a time card punched into the graveyard shift of inhumanity.
Amar Paul: Michael looks the same way at the end of the thriller video.
Amar Paul: I swear, there's a scene where you can see him throwing on his man suit before his lover wakes up, where all she'll know is his arm wrapped around her, and not how he looks back at the camera in silence.
Amar Paul: His eyes, two yellow orbs, slid in Vanter black. How could I not scream when his gaze meant toward my nightmares?
Amar Paul: How can I believe my mother when she came running? It's not real! It's not real! Knowing that each time she slept, all she heard were rebuttals. Wow.
Amar Paul: … Alright, so… This is malls.
Amar Paul: I never expected romantic.
Amar Paul: I never expected romance in the 8th grade.
Amar Paul: After being marooned in New Hampshire for a year, barely escaping the islands of the new kid, and still continents away from crushing.
Amar Paul: But a month into school, they invited me and some kids to Kay's house after last period.
Amar Paul: On the bus, we listened to All I Have by JLo and LL Coachic, which meant we were grown and ready to graduate from a handful and two-week-old relationships. It was time to get serious. Someone would be on and have some notes in class with a question, do you like me? Check yes or no.
Amar Paul: To erase the stress of waiting for the checkmark's landing, or the possibility of our fates being snatched by teachers, we had to wrangle our destinies like scratchy-throated shepherds in need of beauty.
Amar Paul: After snacking on peanut butter crackers and a Cool Ranch Doritos.
Amar Paul: We sat in a circle in Kate's partially unpacked living room and watched the horizontal striped bottle rotate, a wheel-shaped streak of green and yellow pairing soulmates. Spin after spin after spin until the bottle stopped and Kate and I were posing dial markers connected by the bridge of a compass needle.
Amar Paul: We knew the rules and crossed into the middle of a circle, our faces leaning in.
Amar Paul: Then it was over.
Amar Paul: Our mouths trapping the smell of peanut butter, Doritos, and discipline. Authorless hate bereft with clutter, but not joy.
Amar Paul: I want to say we had the best three weeks of middle school, with our love ascended into high school, like a pair of vines sprawling across the forest floor of our teenage years when we barely talked. Just shared an occasional glance and smile, as if we knew, in this brand new town, romance was a language we were now grown enough to learn.
Amar Paul: This is my last poem, thank you so much for listening, thank you so much for coming out. I'm so excited for my next readers, they're gonna be amazing. Farner, you're gonna be in front of you already. I'm just like… I'm excited to just watch you beat me for, like, more than 40 minutes.
Amar Paul: Buy the book, buy the book, buy the book, buy the book. My shit already came in, you know what I mean? But I might buy it. I support the homies, you know? Alright, so, it's my last movie.
Amar Paul: This is called Invocation for the God of Laughter.
Amar Paul: Oh, humor's ghostwriter.
Amar Paul: Oh, culprit of the open-mouthed elated exhale.
Amar Paul: O conductor of playground merriment, O feather tickling a boisterous song from the quiet orchestra of our lungs.
Amar Paul: Oh, secret menu of delicacies chefed by shared glee. O language excavated from the moments when language is lost. O ring descending to spite a desert-dry punchline, I summon you.
Amar Paul: to this party, where I know two people.
Amar Paul: Myself?
Amar Paul: And whatever grief that followed me here. Whatever sorrow that bought the ticket to the sometimes cedar of solitude I call my mind, or heart, or bedroom, whatever anti-muse that begged me to leave this palm, this conjuring in an abandoned ground of code.
Amar Paul: But how can I discard this calling when I have a sweet tooth for delays?
Amar Paul: How do I see joy in turn away?
Amar Paul: I'm not sad enough to believe the opposite of anguish is English, but sometimes I forget. Oh, patron saints of a child's trauma.
Amar Paul: Oh, architect of Hyena's dialect, O Founding Father of Gafah, forgive me, for the days I do not have enough wit to transform a group of strangers into a council of rapturous robists, much less myself. In those moments.
Amar Paul: Don't believe me.
Amar Paul: I promise.
Amar Paul: There is a statue of you in my belly, and each time I kneel over with laughter, I am genuflicted.
Amar Paul: Each bellow a prayer. Each wheeze an amen, a reminder that even one giggle is enough to break solemnity like a crepier ray splitting across the sky.
Amar Paul: Thank you.
Amar Paul: Okay, while I was sitting there, I was like, oh my god, there were so many other things that I wanted to say about Mpending, so I'm gonna say them super quick. The first one is that, I was on… I've been on the Boston Poetry Slam team, and the first year that I was on the team, and every year after, like, Miles, our coach, shows us videos, sometimes at the beginning of practice, of, like.
Amar Paul: slam legends. Like, if you're on a football team, you study film like that. I remember the first video that we ever watched as a team in 2022 was Whistling Vivaldi by McKendy, and then we came to Northeast, like, the regional competition, and it was in this room, and McKendy came up on stage and started doing that
Amar Paul: I was, like, crazy.
Amar Paul: But it just… it was so… it was so cool to see him in person, and then it was so much better when I started talking to him, because he's actually just, like, the coolest guy in session music time. So, give it up one more time.
Amar Paul: Okay, coming up next to this mic, we're gonna keep it going. Oh, wow, and he really, like, kept his time loops, too, which is awesome. A professional. Okay, coming up next to this mic… okay, I'm gonna read her bio, and then I'll say a little bit more. …
Amar Paul: Amy Argentar is a poet and nonprofit professional based in Boston.
Amar Paul: Chicago, born and raised, she is proud to be from the birthplace of slam, and will gladly invite you, reader, to have a long conversation in a dive bar about nothing in particular, as long as you try my work first.
Amar Paul: She is forever grateful for the poetry community, which has allowed her to write extensively on her relationship to emptiness, fullness, pain, legacy, and being the kid forever trying to figure out when to enter the conversation circle.
Amar Paul: Speaking of legacy, a kid wrote in her yearbook once that, Amy equals number one good. And she would spend the rest of her life trying to live up to that.
Amar Paul: Well, her first word was fat.
Amar Paul: And her last word will likely be something similarly profound. You can find her work at your local open mic, as well as via her three self-published chapbooks, All Birts Go to Heaven, Supposed To, and Everything But The, which are also for sale in the bag. Okay, and then the other things that I'll say about Amy is that, yeah, I don't know, I'm just so lucky to know Amy. We have…
Amar Paul: I have…
Amar Paul: been writing at the Cantab, writing and performing at the CanTab for almost as long as she has, like, we started coming in around the same time, which was April of, like, 3 years ago, and…
Amar Paul: we have since then written so much together, and been inspired by each other's work, and she is truly a poet who is, like, doing really weird shit, and is always down to, like, push that art forward. We have a group piece where we…
Amar Paul: it's like we're in a corn maze, and we're trying to find each other, and everybody in the audience is pulling up pieces of corn, and we're crowd walking through the audience, trying to find one another. So, like, I don't know. Just, you know, pitch any idea to each other, and be like, yeah, okay, let's try that out. And I just really appreciate that civility.
Amar Paul: And…
Amar Paul: Yeah, and on top of all of that, she's, like, an amazing organizer and friend, and I'm very lucky to know her, and I'm very excited for all of you to hear her work, so please give it up for Amy Argentine!
Amar Paul: As you can see, because I don't have a ton of, like, officially published work out, I just use my bio as an excuse to make whoever's introducing me just read all of them.
Amar Paul: Yeah, I won't, threaten you with the shot on board. It's more of like, yeah, take one, if you want.
Amar Paul: Anyway, so, so excited and happy to be here, at this book release.
Amar Paul: … What if we just did the car baseball? That would be crazy.
Amar Paul: That's all you need, that's what you really need for it, is a picture. We have paper and pencil.
Amar Paul: Alright, again, I'm very excited to read a quick anecdote. Can we please give it up another time for McKenney?
Amar Paul: The anecdote, that was my first time ever seeing you perform, and I remember, because I missed the first, like, 5 lines of that poem, because you started doing it, and then, like, 4 people that I knew… that I thought I knew really well started losing their mind.
Amar Paul: Like, songs you would laugh…
Amar Paul: I don't know if something happened, and it was because it was just listening quality and experience. Anyway!
Amar Paul: I just… I'm very happy to be here. I'm gonna read a few poems.
Amar Paul: This one is from Everything But Them. It's called In Which I'm Separated into All of My Parts.
Amar Paul: As if I didn't spend my adolescence wishing myself into Barbie doll. Not so much wanting to become idyllic, immutable, impossible, but instead, able to separate my limbs with the pure anger of a two-year-old fist, who doesn't recognize a Barbie doll as representative of a human woman because it doesn't…
Amar Paul: look like one.
Amar Paul: So there I go, all arms and legs strewn about the linoleum with a singular goal, to put myself back into the box I lived in.
Amar Paul: Piece by piece, limb by limb. So when I say I feel broken, people believe me. And when I say I feel trapped, they will undo the twist ties of my joints until the real home hits me in the face.
Amar Paul: Like a flying receipt from the target I was bought from, and the target on my back is actually a moving spasm turned cemented, that some see as a main cover, and I see as an expert the spot for some chiropractor to hit, hit, push, and break me clean in him. All limbs and nowhere to go. Hoping I'm better than the space I leave behind, and something about this just kills me.
Amar Paul: What kills me isn't how distant I am from the rest of me.
Amar Paul: I lived this life by collecting the pieces of myself off the floor, selecting whichever appendage is most useful. Instead, I am killed.
Amar Paul: Because my home has forever been in the dislocation, of the places I don't belong, and I am only trying to keep peace of me where I do.
Amar Paul: Listen, I can't remember which one. Okay.
Amar Paul: I'm doing this one… I'm doing poems, I think, …
Amar Paul: That, some coincidentally, some not coincidentally, just have the word common in the lot.
Amar Paul: For no reason at all, and… Also, this, Carver likes this one, so I didn't do it.
Amar Paul: This is called, I Never Want to Get Out of the Uber, I never want to make it home.
Amar Paul: Turn left onto Memorial Drive. I want to be blurring beyond lights.
Amar Paul: Somewhat familiar landmarks, and warm, and cozy, and always moving, always moving, as in nothing left to do.
Amar Paul: As in the depth we dream about.
Amar Paul: As in, not the bad kind. As in, there are fewer colors here in this after-dark, sun-covered silence, and 200 feet turned right onto Commonwealth Avenue, but it's okay.
Amar Paul: As in, no, it's really, really okay. As in, deep breath in.
Amar Paul: As in, I'm inside out. As in, I'm actually outside in, for once? I want to feel like an empty building. As in, I want to run inside every building and find all of the corners of every room and destroy them, and it's the only thing I have ever wanted to destroy, and electric feet turned left onto Anne Rose Street, and I have only ever been a girl trying to run away.
Amar Paul: Suitcase in my heart, in my arm, in my left hand, other hand on the front door, begging my parents with the back of my head for a reason to stay. A lesson we always learn too early, for I never want to feel not at home.
Amar Paul: at home.
Amar Paul: Until after the day I die. Turn right! I still don't know where I am. Turn right! I still don't know where I'm supposed to go from here. My favorite thing to do is let someone take the wheel and press the gas, and for me to look out the window like it means anything at all…
Amar Paul: Besides for the next 5 minutes, turn right, I want to be a green tomato.
Amar Paul: I want to be so…
Amar Paul: Beautiful. Terry right, just such a symbol of life, and the first thing people see after they have planted something meaningful and watch it grow from what it has were leaves.
Amar Paul: When it's ready. And 50 feet, turn right onto Beacon Street. I want it to be so fresh, and so beautiful, and to most importantly, never be picked. Drop-off is on the road.
Amar Paul: I was taught my whole life how to not be picked.
Amar Paul: Why am I expected now to learn to be limp in someone else's hands? Oh, gosh.
Amar Paul: This is from my first chapter I ever self-published, which is All Verbs Go to Heaven. Scientifically questionable, but, like, it actually opens with a quote from my dad that says, scientifically, that's probably true.
Amar Paul: He's a lot of free, it's, you know, it's not a specialty. Anyway…
Amar Paul: old… this is a very old poem for me, as in it's, like, 2 years old. But it goes to… because I consider this old, it's a testament to how much I have
Amar Paul: grown over the past two years, and I really, really couldn't have been able to grow as much as I have without the support of this community, and without writing, with incredible poets, and partnering with them, and making beautiful art with them, so much like the stuff I've written with you. Cornpole did wonders for my kids.
Amar Paul: Anyway, yeah, so I like to think about this when I read this poem.
Amar Paul: But yeah.
Amar Paul: I ordered Chinese food because I was sad.
Amar Paul: And on the way home, I made myself a little sad.
Amar Paul: So much sadder, in fact, that I let it fall from my grip with a plop on the table. A plot that contained such dismissal, because despite my best efforts, I knew that it pitied me.
Amar Paul: The bag. The bag that I plopped. And it made such a sad plop sound that I became too sad to even want it anymore, but the sun was still shining out the window to my left, and I did not want to be sad. I did not want to waste the day by wasting the last thing I did for myself getting the Chinese food, so I opened it.
Amar Paul: All of the sadness that I still had left bottled up in my fingertips.
Amar Paul: And as if it's life's purpose… as if life's purpose was to be the eternal last straw, the staple in the paper bag cut my finger, and I saw the blood leaking from the very top of my fingertip, and I made it mean something.
Amar Paul: I made the blood on my fingertip mean something that was also very sad, because of course.
Amar Paul: And it didn't even hurt, but now… it did. I cut myself on the staple in the paper bag and somehow made that about me. Why do I make everything about me? Why do I make everything about me? Now, the heat is getting out of the bag like an active volcano that has been told to never erupt, so I grab a covering.
Amar Paul: Take a bite.
Amar Paul: It's not that good. It's not that good. They didn't use the sauce that came with it.
Amar Paul: I didn't use the sauce. Why don't I use the sauce? I didn't use the sauce because I rush into everything. When I rush into everything, I spill things onto my sleep.
Amar Paul: Like my heart, like the still unused sob, and my sleep detective looked up at me and remind me that when I dry, it's not like tears that dry onto it, it's snot. All snot, it only ever just snot, so stop is drying!
Amar Paul: And both the crab raccoon in my hand, and the crab raccoon in my stomach, Laughing.
Amar Paul: Because I still think everyone laughs it.
Amar Paul: Because people did for a long time.
Amar Paul: I still don't really know why.
Amar Paul: I have another bite.
Amar Paul: Without the sauce again.
Amar Paul: And it's that… this time, it's because I don't deserve the sauce.
Amar Paul: I don't deserve the sauce, because as I'm writing this, I really want to make a joke about being lost in the sauce, but I know it would be unnecessary and cheap, and just to get a little laugh, I do most things just to get a little laugh, and they wonder why people laugh at me, but I have to stop writing.
Amar Paul: Because my cat has knocked off my plastic fork off of the table, which now lays on the floor.
Amar Paul: Also laughing at me.
Amar Paul: I have to stand up to get it.
Amar Paul: But standing up and starting over.
Amar Paul: So I don't.
Amar Paul: But I have to.
Amar Paul: There's something poetic in that.
Amar Paul: But I'm terribly, terribly sad.
Amar Paul: So I'm gonna leave.
Amar Paul: And all I can do is hope that this poem will continue on without. Wow. It will definitely continue on without.
Amar Paul: Very well.
Amar Paul: But can I just get a check through how I'm feeling about the rest of the show? Hey!
Amar Paul: Okay.
Amar Paul: I'm super excited to, like, sit back down there, listen to the rest of our readers, and listen for 40 minutes from a part of knowledge.
Amar Paul: Just to drop some more Group Peace lore. I'm actually gonna read something new. It's shorter.
Amar Paul: It is a golden turtle.
Amar Paul: And I know a golden shovel is a form that a partner is very good at and enjoys, so I didn't doing a Golden Shovel use… and for those who don't know, Golden Shovel takes a line of poetry and then the…
Amar Paul: You're so much better. Like, here's the line, and the last word of that line is the first word from this… I'm gonna just do it. It uses the line in the poem.
Amar Paul: It's from Hawk Girl Walk? Which is this really profound.
Amar Paul: People walking through a crowd. People think, like.
Amar Paul: What's going on? It was, the first group piece we wrote together, and there is a couple lines that we say in unit, but the line I chose to, work with here was, the cardinal rule of a hot girl walk is to never stop walking. Feet against the pavement.
Amar Paul: I'm always waiting for the first sign of spring.
Amar Paul: One time, it was a cardinal, letting out a still song, it buried into tree wheat, breaking every rule winter tried to impose upon it. I listened.
Amar Paul: Wrote down its scripture. Melanie foraged of fallen flower petals and crushed dandelions in a handful of prayer, fulgarized to poison. I hold it tightly.
Amar Paul: My fist hot with friction, kilning the music into protest anthem for any girl told to wither away and to walk away from any sign of women, any brown leaves, any whisper that she is about to birth a new season. And to that, I say never try to be anything but the trunk of your tree.
Amar Paul: Don't stop singing a sun that rises early and sets late. Don't stop anyone from walking over the leaves of your past, for their feet will simply push it all back into your roots, against all perception, for even a horizon is really just anything that the moon leaves behind. A line in the sand.
Amar Paul: A crack in the paint.
Amar Paul: … Okay.
Amar Paul: Amy, just to complete the lore, so Amy and I have 3 group pieces together, and it's, Hawk Girl Walk, the Corn Maze one, and the other one is called Chipwitch.
Amar Paul: Which chip? We're always, yeah, we really are always investigating very, very, like, the fundamental questions of human existence.
Amar Paul: Did I what? We do, but we do, yeah. It's called melting.
Amar Paul: Okay, without further ado, I'm going to announce, your next reader for the night.
Amar Paul: And then, okay, I'll read their bio, and I'll also give them a little bit of a description.
Amar Paul: Miles Taylor is a transmasculine writer, organizer, educator, food service worker, Capricorn, Aquarius, cusp, and glitter enthusiast. They are the current director of the historic Boston Poetry Slam at the Pantot Lounge, and former president and alum of the Anderson Poetry Project.
Amar Paul: They have been representing Boston at poetry tournaments and festivals internationally for close to a decade. Their debut collection, Masculinity Parable, published by Game Over Books in 1983, bless you, which was shortlisted for the Nisrath Yusini Poetry Prize.
Amar Paul: Their publications and performance videos can be found at miles-taylor.com, and their neurosies can be found on social media at miles-poms. They live amongst the rats of Alston, Massachusetts.
Amar Paul: All right, Miles Taylor is… there's too much for me to say in this moment, but what I will say is that Miles has been my slam coach for the last three years… like, four and a half slam teams that I've been on at Fossil Poetry Slam.
Amar Paul: He's been the president of this year's nonprofit, Boston Poetry Slam, and he's really just been a very, very good friend.
Amar Paul: And when I wrote this book, and I submitted manuscript Game Over Books.
Amar Paul: Josh, the editor-in-chief, was like, hey, Miles is gonna be your editor, and I was like, oh, that's awesome, because Miles has worked with my work for so long, and also, their book is amazing, so I was like, they can really help me get this… get this together. And it was, like, much more than helping me get it together. I think Miles really pushed me to… Miles always pushes me in my performance.
Amar Paul: but pushed me on the page and in this book in a way that I hadn't been pushed before in my poetry. And, one thing that I really remember them saying is, well, I have a…
Amar Paul: the way that I write a poem is, like, it's kind of just, like, a paragraph, like, a run-on sentence, and Miles, like, looked at all my paragraphs in my body, and was like, yeah, you can spread this out, like…
Amar Paul: And, … Like, when you perform a poem.
Amar Paul: people, like, the lines land, and you give it pause, and you… there's space for people to hear it. You make people uncomfortable.
Amar Paul: And I just am actually so grateful that Miles is somebody who pushes me to create that space and also live within it, because, yeah, I don't know, that's like her poetry hack.
Amar Paul: So, without further ado, please give it up for Miles!
Amar Paul: Okay. I, I need to touch the bystanders every time. Great.
Amar Paul: Wow. This is an incredible, incredible show. This is wild. Thank you all for being here. Wait, okay. I wrote down the thing I wanted to say, so that I wouldn't… Right, okay, there are books in the back. I am vending books in the back.
Amar Paul: with Game Over Books. I am the event coordinator for Game Over Books, as well as, an author with them. They published me, and then, they treated me so well and were so cool that I was like, actually, I want to work with you guys to, like, give back, because it's a really special local press. And so, please talk to me if you're interested in other Game Over Books collections. And also, I was like, hey, Josh, can you give me a bunch of books to sell from other authors? And he was like, no.
Amar Paul: And I was like, that's so cool.
Amar Paul: can we make a free shipping code so that other people can buy books online? He's like, oh, yeah, sure. So basically, if you use code HOMEFREE today only on the online store, dailybook.com, you can get any books with free shipping.
Amar Paul: So, please, take any time tonight to peruse their catalog and see some other books they've got, really special stuff. Including my book, because I only have two physical copies right now.
Amar Paul: I also have, the calendar for Boston Boji Sun, which Aparna and I work on together, in the back as well, if you want to take them with you to remember why the shows are. Aparna is featuring with us on November 12th.
Amar Paul: link together, let me think. Okay.
Amar Paul: Okay, emotional time. … I like…
Amar Paul: I, I… so I took back over the Boston Fulture Center in 2022. Kind of loosely in 2020, because we tried to do an online virtual thing. It did not work out.
Amar Paul: But reopening it, like, we've lost so many regulars, we lost so many staff members, and everything changed over so much that it, was really hard to find those sort of culture bearers of the scene who wrote in the…
Amar Paul: In the style of the scene, and who really, like.
Amar Paul: had the energy and attitude at the shows at the scene, who listened intently, who was a great audience member, poet, slammer, and just community member overall. And Aparno is really, really essential to bringing that culture back, and making it thrive again.
Amar Paul: I don't know, there are certain people in this scene, in this room, that if you didn't move to Boston.
Amar Paul: Oh, like I…
Amar Paul: So I'm very grateful. I looked through all my book and kind of identified the ones that have something to do with home, and all of them are the weird short ones, so… And I do a bunch of weird short poems when we go on stage.
Amar Paul: This is a titular poem, I don't read this. Titular means of the title.
Amar Paul: Technology.
Amar Paul: My dad loves to earn the trust of skittish animals.
Amar Paul: For every happy puppy in the world, he finds the cats with trust issues and makes them a project. A local dog was afraid of men due to a violent past, but one day, she poked her thin nose into his palm. He's taught the cat to jump up on the bed, and soon he says he'll pick her up, and she will learn something.
Amar Paul: Or maybe he will feel like a beast, poorly.
Amar Paul: I'm checking in on a man who does not check on others. I wait for him to ask me any question. I say I am not in love with him, I am just desperate for an equity in care. For love to be reward means there is life after the ceremony. When it sits on your bantam.
Amar Paul: Maybe you get around to polishing.
Amar Paul: Get rid of it.
Amar Paul: Not Austin on any Austin… It's good for me.
Amar Paul: A woman has a theatrical breakdown in front of Wonder Bar, also 2019. I kind of envy.
Amar Paul: As she can crouch and rise in those stilettos and the bodycon, as she cries, screaming at this man who always ruins everything. I think I wish I could just let it out, make a fool of the Capricorn sensibilities, shout at the sky and sob at the glass ground, the McD's raft and the safe butts. I couldn't pick her out of the crowd in the daytime. I don't wonder if she knows that.
Amar Paul: Calculate the anonymity beforehand, all red dye, bad eyeliner, or if it's this city's timing embrace, like it's holding her hair back, saying, alright.
Amar Paul: just this once.
Amar Paul: The summer has the potential to be miraculous! Which might just be the whiskey milkshake talking, but the sky is stupid with its sunset, the most universal symbol of beauty. Though human is too good to wax poetic about an orange-pink cloud, not even the suited and studied and sidewalk, you can't pass Charles in a new dress without smiling and missing your stuff.
Amar Paul: So I'm a nature bitch now. I'm in the lover's quarrel with the Prudential Center. I've got eyes like a real man whose doors close too early to catch me. I walk past the fat dandy lions on my way home, and don't even check what handmade structures wound up penthouses for rats. I know, like, a hundred people with jackets, and most of them love me.
Amar Paul: My dad's always sending me pictures of clouds, so I sent him weird band names off the Alston streets, and neither of us talk about feelings. A bug liked the looks of my phone screen while I wrote this, I told her she was looking at the wrong kind of light.
Amar Paul: Wow.
Amar Paul: It's an FSR level.
Amar Paul: I love this one. We're the only person that's ever been like, I like that one book. I was like, damn, how much older.
Amar Paul: A part of the book, no filler.
Amar Paul: That goes to the end.
Amar Paul: I have one of those, and I could be that for other people look good.
Amar Paul: A recurring obsession I have involved announcing my former selves, so sometimes I'd go out in my brain to try to kill them.
Amar Paul: The teen who hadn't read the right books yet wasn't at marching band practice, so I moved up to the college student who'd already left the show, and I laughed too loud. I almost caught myself in one of the many classrooms full of my misinformed comments, but I lost myself in the crowd at home. I finally found myself in my 20s, clocking into the job I thought I was bad at, writing, all this gender drama and broadcasting, all these neuroses, and just generally being a menace.
Amar Paul: We locked eyes while I raised the pistol, but we were both so busy being afraid of each other, I didn't realize the gun was made of chalk and oil and clean white light, and I couldn't pull the trigger.
Amar Paul: I looked… Photoshops. Like… A collage clinic.
Amar Paul: You're walking nowhere.
Amar Paul: Shame is just an attempt to disown a moment you learned from. Wow. I left myself there, knowing I'd be back. Wow.
Amar Paul: Awesome, huh?
Amar Paul: Everywhere there is construction. Changing hands every three drags to keep one warm, this is how I learned to have propeller.
Amar Paul: I don't regret moving to the city, but I'm still taken aback by the whole thing. Ruining each acquaint and shit that the first book, frozen Heineken's under my porch, settle down.
Amar Paul: Nothing is settled, and everything is down. Privileged. Talk about the unprivileged, like, either bugs.
Amar Paul: Sometimes a truck still drives by blasting light, and sometimes they are singing along, but mostly there's construction. Everything hasn't disappeared until it happens. Settle down is what they say when the construction is complete, and the bugs become ghosts, and the ghosts become murals on the sides of the condos, once the condos connect into walls on the moon.
Amar Paul: We'll try, and no one will let me.
Amar Paul: Hmm…
Amar Paul: This is for fathers.
Amar Paul: Softness can be… The base of the horns pointed down.
Amar Paul: the YouTube back.
Amar Paul: Always proving you wrong.
Amar Paul: That's moving in, right?
Amar Paul: Inheritance is implied.
Amar Paul: He rambles about his psoriasis, knowing you were crying on the other end.
Amar Paul: Knees folded on a kitchen floor, you see him in his desk chair, four hours away, awful orange carpet, old dictionary smell. Love does not have to be loud. How else can you love a man who raised something he never could have met? Won't call you her name yet, but remarks one day. You must be the first they to do poetry in that country.
Amar Paul: Love is implied.
Amar Paul: Heaven.
Amar Paul: Masculine love is a language that has to be studied. It's the way you talk about your dying dog, about city life. You say you're tired. And he says, you can't be a writer unless you can throw out a tired piece, start again.
Amar Paul: Really excited to hear so.
Amar Paul: Oh, this swears at this one.
Amar Paul: I'm gonna hang on that still a second.
Amar Paul: Okay, pun with only a little bit of sacrilege.
Amar Paul: I want to be like the heroes in the movies, but every time I drop something, I jump out of the way.
Amar Paul: I feel like the parrot in the back of the neighborhood pet store, that's really obviously a mom run. Like, I just keep seeing unspeakable horrors, but I can only really, like, repeat the same few words, and none of them encapsulate my feelings. God is a girlboss who keeps promising me a raise, and I really don't want to know how clothes are made. This is why I'm not a parent.
Amar Paul: I've been too good for too long and need life and anti-therapy. Terrible advice and a couple bad influence perched on my shoulders. Let my chaos expand until I implode into a rebirth every day. It'll feel like the summer I slept on seven used mattress pads stacked on someone else's floor. My friend brought coronavirus as a house for me, even though it most certainly was not a house. Nothing ever feels like a house anymore.
Amar Paul: I wanna be in a house.
Amar Paul: Single unit, walled, and self-sustaining.
Amar Paul: Like the moon. Yeah, like the moon. No, okay, don't even start with me. So a man stumbled past me post-shift last Sunday, waiting for a train that never comes, and the moon was full, and the sky was clear, and the man was incoherent, going, safety, over and over, I don't know why. Until he built up, like, just crystal clear wind.
Amar Paul: -Oh.
Amar Paul: And that's the power of the moon, baby! That's all the pages of a birthday party! Stop writing about the moon, boring people yell. And the poets pick up pitchforks and give them indistinguishable battle crying. When no one gets heard about the moon, truly, what else can I live for when all I see out of my window is a car dealership, an impression, and the moon? The moon, just good vibes, and one piece of American trash, just like me. Thanks, y'all.
Amar Paul: What a wonderful evening this has been so far, with the three
Amar Paul: fantastic poets sharing their poetry with us. Akinde and Amy and Miles, it's, it's really fantastic. The thought-provoking stuff that they put out, but also the very entertaining stuff.
Amar Paul: And there's one remark in particular that I think I'm likely to remember for a long time. That was when McKendy said something about a crepescular ray flitting across the sky. So, I'll be looking at the sky a little more carefully from now.
Amar Paul: So, now, about Aparna. Aparna is a writer, a chemical engineer, Banana bread enthusiasm.
Amar Paul: And, the Mitchell Rossford Constructor, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Amar Paul: Her poetry and prose has been recognized by reckoning.
Amar Paul: TMT review, and, getting drowned, among others.
Amar Paul: She, edited the anthology, Reflections of the Land.
Amar Paul: Published by Literary Cleveland in 2022, and, is a co-editor of Good Sioux.
Amar Paul: She can probably explain that later.
Amar Paul: Performs regularly.
Amar Paul: posts occasionally, and slams sometimes at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cat Tab Lounge. Poemfree is Aparna's debut full-length poetry.
Amar Paul: So let me add a few, sort of personal remarks, for now. It may be a bit unseemly, perhaps, you know, on this occasion, to sort of wax eloquent as a parental unit. I don't know if technology needs achievement.
Amar Paul: But I cannot resist the temptation.
Amar Paul: Here, I share, one anecdote from many years ago when Aparna was in high school. I think it was high school, might have been late middle school, I forget the year. But she had contributed
Amar Paul: An article, or maybe it was a quote, about a very profound, subject matter, chocolate.
Amar Paul: I contributed this article, to, for a local online, publication, that was meant to foster community in our small town in Pennsylvania.
Amar Paul: Evidently, that piece for Yakarna made such a marked impression on the editor.
Amar Paul: That, he still brings it up, whenever we talk even today. So that high school student is now a poet, an accomplished poet, and I am proud to introduce her.
Amar Paul: That was my dad.
Amar Paul: Okay, I am going to… I have a set prepared, and I was looking at it over there, and I was like, I don't really know.
Amar Paul: So, well, I'm gonna be doing my set, but I'm gonna also probably be doing some sort of improv. No, no, no, not like improv.
Amar Paul: No, just a minute.
Amar Paul: How do you mean?
Amar Paul: I spell my name for a barista, and halfway through, I forget what I am doing.
Amar Paul: I stand there in silence.
Amar Paul: She stares at me.
Amar Paul: Did I forget my name? Did I forget how to name myself?
Amar Paul: Did I forget myself? And can I call it forgetting if it felt like relief?
Amar Paul: In my dream, I considered changing my name to all new.
Amar Paul: I imagine the name that is easier to pronounce than the one I have, and the name that is harder to pronounce than the one I have.
Amar Paul: I imagine the name of the past, my mother's and my father's. I imagine the name of the future, the name of the sun that rise tomorrow. In my mom's religion, a child is not given a name until their seventh day.
Amar Paul: In my childhood, my father asked me not to name my mother's religion. When I asked why, his response was not that it was 3 years after 9-11, and we had moved to the most conservative county in America.
Amar Paul: He didn't have to say that part.
Amar Paul: He just said by name. Aparna means without a means.
Amar Paul: I had to Google that because strangers kept asking me what my name meant. When I asked my parents the same question, they just said, we don't know, we just liked how it sounded. Have you tried Googling it? My parents of different religions did not choose a name in either one, at risk of offending the other's family.
Amar Paul: Instead, chose a name that meant nothing.
Amar Paul: Aparna means without use.
Amar Paul: barren wasteland brought to bear, no leaves of a family tree, empty, empty. A man speaks early to me, and before I can respond, my friend says she doesn't speak Urdu, she doesn't speak anything.
Amar Paul: Nothing, nothing, nothing. The silence may as well be my name.
Amar Paul: Empty everywhere. So why, I ask? I am always asking why. Useless pursuit of meaning. Why did you choose this name? My parents say, because we like the director, Hernus Eng. Because, I hear, I'm always listening for the because.
Amar Paul: Because we heard a name and saw a storyteller.
Amar Paul: Because, because, because we heard a name that meant empty.
Amar Paul: Because when there are no leaves, there are no leaves yet.
Amar Paul: That means anything.
Amar Paul: Any… Mike Bloom.
Amar Paul: One thing that… so, like, because I'm really used to performing in poetry slands, like, you just go up to the mic and you do your poem. There isn't a lot of introduction, so I'm really pushing myself to give the context for the poem, which I know I didn't just do there.
Amar Paul: But…
Amar Paul: Yeah, okay, well, I guess I'm gonna… I'm gonna keep going, but I'll get punished for this next one. So there's a lot of… there's a lot of, like, loss in this book. There's a lot of me dealing with my insecurities around language, my… I only speak English, my mom speaks Gujarati. Also, I actually like many other languages, but her family's language is Gujarati, and my dad's language is Malayalam, and so in the house growing up.
Amar Paul: the language that was spoken was English. And I've really been…
Amar Paul: My nani, my mom's mom, lives with my parents now, and has lived with my parents for, like, the last couple years, so anytime that I go home, I really work on trying to learn Gujarati from my mom and my nani, and also some of my other family members who are here in the crowd today. Very excited to have them. Honestly, I was talking to, my…
Amar Paul: like, I was speaking Gujarati with my… or we were speaking in the kitchen, and I was asking all of these questions about, like, what does this word mean? Why does this mean this? How do you structure this sentence? And everyone was like, honestly, you should just ask Zoya…
Amar Paul: this amazing 8-year-old. She'll have the best grasp of it. But anyway, so that will come up again later.
Amar Paul: Okay, yeah, I'm rushing. This next poem, another theme throughout the book is, this idea of loss.
Amar Paul: but also trying to see, like, what exists in that space when something is lost, and how we can move forward. And I just really think there's a… there's a poet named Chen Chen, and he has a quote that is, how do you tell someone you love them without making them think about one day using you? And I think that that drives forward a lot of the work in this book.
Amar Paul: This is, everyone loves a party.
Amar Paul: After John Marine.
Amar Paul: Lose everything.
Amar Paul: Lose your closest friendships while trying to plan a party. Lose your sets of self in the Costco bakery section. Lose your car in the Party City parking lot. Lose an entire afternoon in traffic.
Amar Paul: Lose your way home, but remember, we only feel homesick when we're gone.
Amar Paul: Remember, you didn't know what home felt like until you left. Remember, you lost your mom in the parking lot.
Amar Paul: You lost your voice yelling her name. You lost your innocence when you found out your mom's name isn't Mom. You lost it again, and you find out she never wanted to be called Mom. She wanted to be called Mommy, which is what she calls her mom.
Amar Paul: In the end, everyone calls for their mother.
Amar Paul: Lose your whole history in a single syllable. Lose your cool. Lose it. I'm serious. Cool is overrated. Lose an enemy and invite them to the party instead. Lose out on every other party happening on Saturday night. Lose track of how many shots you had, have another. Lose track of how many shots you had, have another. Lose track…
Amar Paul: Lose a whole hour of your life and apply your friends in the morning to give it back. They will remember, and you will think you do, too. Will remember the outlines of it, even as you lose trust in the details.
Amar Paul: Lose your ex's number, why do you even have that? Lose your keys, lose your breath on the dance floor, lose your way back in… back into the kitchen. Did you lose your keys? It doesn't matter. It's your house. Lose your grip on the cake, lose a whole cake. Lose your appetite when you look at the cake on the floor. Lose your grip on the situation. Lose control. Control is overrated. Lose your voice again. Lose your cool, lose your breath, lose it.
Amar Paul: We go outside to breathe in deeply.
Amar Paul: Lose the angry red air from your lungs. Lose your lungs. Lose your body. Remember your bottom. You can only remember something once it's lost. You can only lose something once it's remembered. Fuzzy outline with no trust. Lose the details. Lose the home. Lose your way back.
Amar Paul: Where the fuck are your keys? There's no one left at the pardon. You lose yourself in the night sky, in the way your breath steams in the dark, every loss inside of you, trying to get found out.
Amar Paul: Okay, another very strong throughline in this collection. Like, people would ask me, what is your book of poetry? And I'd be like, well, it's, like, about my mom, and about fast food restaurants. And, this is a problem about a fast food.
Amar Paul: These days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a McDonald's drive room, and I just don't think that that's what I'm after. And when my friend pulls up and the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, and it asks.
Amar Paul: do you want to die with that? And my friend looks over at me and asks, well, do you?
Amar Paul: And I say, I'm good with just the Pepsi, thanks.
Amar Paul: And the eldritch were profound and decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born, or the edge of a paper slicing his skin, or your dad shutting the door on your family the morning that he dies, and my friend says, oh, I think they only have Coke products here. And I say, then I guess a cherry Coke.
Amar Paul: And my friend says, okay, a McChicken, a cherry tote, plus, can I get an answer to the question unspoken in my heart? Because my friend is always saying stuff like that, especially in the McDonald's drive-thru. At this time, the voice from the speaker is sweet, dulcan caramel dripping off a spoon, a siren song in symphony, and my friend says, dang.
Amar Paul: I think I'm a dollar short.
Amar Paul: But it's okay, because I have $2 in my pocket. And anyway, prophecies are free here. Free like the way any of us are. Free as a man with an albatross round his neck. Free as an albatross round a man's neck since the albatross is dead. And isn't death the kind of freedom? Free like a limited-time-only BOGO sale at the gap, free like you'll still have to give up your firstborn son, but whatever. Who's having babies in this economy, anyway?
Amar Paul: Not to mention, your first floor won't be as sun. If anything, there'll be the moon! And I drive through the window, and my friend's Camry sounds like it might fall apart right there, and so might I, if I'm being honest.
Amar Paul: And I look into the black hole at the first window, or rather, it looks into me.
Amar Paul: I blink first, and it becomes a murder of robes.
Amar Paul: silent, except to say, second window only tonight. And we're at the second window, which is a little grimy, with a freckle of the spectacle team behind it, and she looks like me, a study in personal time travel. But when I ask my friend, he says, hey, doesn't that guy look like me?
Amar Paul: So it could be the whole world, or nothing at all, and I'm handed the cherry poke without much fanfare, and the teen leans out the window to whisper in my friend's ear, and I strain to listen. But all I hear is the rustling of the first breeze that ever swept this earth, and when my friend turns to me, he says.
Amar Paul: Prophecy machine is down tonight. Can I get a sip of your cherry coat? And we drive away, dial shifting through static, as the world dissolves in the whipping wind, fresh fizz, and our laughter spilling into empty eternity.
Amar Paul: Awesome.
Amar Paul: This next poem that I'm going to read…
Amar Paul: And speaking out is really into Fernando.
Amar Paul: Okay, this next song that I'm gonna read, is again on this idea of,
Amar Paul: homesickness, and it's also… it's the… the title track of the book, the titular poem, as Miles and happens to my question.
Amar Paul: And it's also… oh, I have to say, the title is… the title is, I don't remember the movie, but I remember in it a character dies, which is actually a lie, because I do remember the movie. It… and it's Avatar 2 Way of Water.
Amar Paul: I'm gonna say it because… I would not recommend them.
Amar Paul: … But I couldn't have that in the title, because it kind of doesn't match with… Alright.
Amar Paul: I don't remember the movie, but I remember in it, a character dies.
Amar Paul: And as he lays dying, he says, I want to go home.
Amar Paul: And I want to go home.
Amar Paul: But I don't know what that means. Because when I was in high school, I stayed as far away from the house for as long as possible.
Amar Paul: Because when I ate dinner at the kitchen table, I stared at the clock to make the numbers turn faster. Because when I was in college, there was a month I called my parents every day, and my mom would never say, I love you, but she would always ask, what did you have for dinner?
Amar Paul: Because when I asked my mom how long she was homesick after moving to this country, she said, I still am.
Amar Paul: So now, when I say the word home, I say it as though it was a horse.
Amar Paul: Fennel seeds and anise and rose leaves, sugared sweet, hard on the teeth. Yes, I say the word home like it's McCloss, like it's dissolving from my tongue. Like it's bright.
Amar Paul: cold, gone, still in my gums four hours later, my mouth open in the moonlight. See, I want to go home, but I stay too late at gardens.
Amar Paul: I keep everyone up worrying, especially myself, until, reluctantly, the sorry sidewalk stumbled to the place I cannot name, my feet carry me to this doormat, and that leaky radiator, and those umbrellas drying on the raft of my feet could have carried me anywhere.
Amar Paul: They could have brought me to the edge of the map, where the borders warped and tear, or they could have walked me to the center of the earth.
Amar Paul: furnace flames, searing shoes so the ground could piss my souls. But instead, they brought me here.
Amar Paul: Home. Free.
Amar Paul: But does that mean I'm free to go home, or that I'm free of home?
Amar Paul: Is freedom having a place to go, or not?
Amar Paul: As he lay dying, he said, I want to go home.
Amar Paul: And I want to go home.
Amar Paul: But I don't know what that means. And I don't know, when I lay dying, what I will say.
Amar Paul: But if I said that, and if my mother heard, she would slap me into the next life in a way. She would say, not know what home means? Did I not teach you this language? Did I not give it to you from my own tongue?
Amar Paul: She would say, was this foam not enough for you? Was this hot meal not a part? Was this house not four walls that kept rain off your head? She would say, have this dinner.
Amar Paul: He'll be all right after dinner.
Amar Paul: She would say, have this look for us. Let your mouth be clean of wishes, let the only dreams be in your sleep. She would say.
Amar Paul: I want to go home.
Amar Paul: 2.
Amar Paul: Okay, this next poem that I'm gonna read… oh, sorry, I'm gonna get short.
Amar Paul: Okay, this next poem that I'm gonna read is about, about water. There's a lot of water in this book.
Amar Paul: And I think a lot about this… this poet, Anna Skertojo, who's on, like, who's part of the mini-less poetry scene, and they have a line that's, like, when you touch… when you're touching water, you're touching all water.
Amar Paul: I don't know, I just really appreciate that.
Amar Paul: And this palm got one.
Amar Paul: The day after the 10-year drought ended, nothing would dry.
Amar Paul: We hung towels on the back porch, and we pressed freshly showered footprints into the hardwood, and we pulled the sheets out of the wash, and we scrubbed the countertops of the grip and grime poured in Zola, and we cleaned the blood between our legs best we could.
Amar Paul: And we pushed tears across the sodden wasteland of our cheekbones, and we couldn't see our reflections in the foggy mirror much as we tried. And we felt the sweat drip down our necks, and we remembered we had necks.
Amar Paul: And we watched condensation form and refuse to die.
Amar Paul: And we watered the basil, and it nearly drowned, and we opened our mouths, and those jaws of salvation were prayed for salvation. Or was it salvation? And we found flowers growing in shower tiles. Or maybe it was black mold, but it grew nonetheless. Life persists.
Amar Paul: And we sat under the windowsill as the moon wept above, and we understood for just one minute why the sea has tides.
Amar Paul: Why our tears disappear as thin air. Why puddles and lakes and rivers and oceans evaporated overnight, and we understood, for just one minute, why all water seeks to rise.
Amar Paul: I'm going to a poem that's a golden shovel, and I'm very thankful for Amy for blessing this mic with a golden shovel earlier, because it is my favorite form, or one of my favorite forms. …
Amar Paul: The Golden Shovel is a poetic form where you take a line of poetry, or a lyric, or something that someone has said to you, and you, end every line in your poem with a word from that line.
Amar Paul: So, when you're reading poem on the Page, if you read vertically down by the last word of every line, then you'll read that original line that you're on.
Amar Paul: And it's… I guess it's a type of code. The Golden Shovel was originated by Terrence Hayes, and he wrote a poem after Gwendolyn Brooks, and it was honoring Gwendolyn Brooks', like, poetry.
Amar Paul: And so it is… it is a form of honoring who came before you. The first time I've heard a Golden Shovel actually was Kat Anderson on the mic at the Tantab Lounge, who's here in the audience.
Amar Paul: They were doing a poem about… it was like a headline about, like, Donald Trump golf courses, something, something, and it was not honor… it was, like, very much, like, a response to that. So it's also possible that it's not just, like, an honoring…
Amar Paul: course celebration …
Amar Paul: Okay, also, oh, other thing that I wanted to say is that I am an anxious person, and I think a lot about things that people have said to me, or, like, things that I've said, and then I go around in circles with it, and so I use a lot of repetition in the book, as you've probably noticed in my work so far. But…
Amar Paul: I think of the Golden Shovel as a way to, like, think of something that someone has said to you and sort of let it go.
Amar Paul: Okay, so this is a golden shovel with something that someone had said to me. It's a golden shovel with a voicemail from my mom. I'm gonna play the…
Amar Paul: To the bus driver who said, Namaste to me when I boarded.
Amar Paul: Hey, what the fuck was up with that? When I told my dad that story, he said, oh, he's trying. And my mom laughed in response.
Amar Paul: She knows that here, drying looks a lot like taunting. Just like a melting pot looks like a slow death by fire.
Amar Paul: She saw how some people don't have tongues, they have mirrors. And I knew that I don't have a tongue, I have a black hole.
Amar Paul: So when you said that to me, the word namaste had disappeared down the gullet like a fish called back to sea, swallowed so fast, I wondered at my own lips, never forming hello, but always forming, I'm sorry, for not being enough.
Amar Paul: For being too much, for not having the right words, for the right language, for calling across the void, and hoping to hear only echo back.
Amar Paul: No one in my family says namaste, because there's enough body language to know a homecoming at first glance.
Amar Paul: In the mirror, at the kitchen table, they're all the same anyway, me and my reflection, we're not alone here. I've got my dad's eyes and my mom's smile, but actually, these laugh lines belong to my nanie.
Amar Paul: Somehow stitching the whole world together and still having a hand free to beat us at hearts. I lost, but I didn't mind. It was better than losing my mind. Most things are. My mind, my memory, my meal, all of us around the table, sitting in eager anticipation for the next deal or the next dinner.
Amar Paul: And wouldn't you believe I'm not a particularly good Indian in that I'm rarely writing about heritage home cooking? But I'm a great American in that I'm almost always writing about arriving at yet another fast food chain. Salvation in the Wendy's drive-thru. If I look hard enough, if I let myself admit what's eating me alive.
Amar Paul: That I didn't mind that much when you said.
Amar Paul: That I was more kicked into the fact that it was a word that never comes from my home mouth. Those syllables, precious nuggets of truth bursting forth on your tongue.
Amar Paul: unraveling words, worlds, isn't it enough to know we want to talk to one another? Isn't it enough to hope that you and I might look past tongues or language, finally part later?
Amar Paul: Perfect.
Amar Paul: How are you feeling?
Amar Paul: Nice. Well, in that case, I guess I'll keep doing more phones. Okay, … I, …
Amar Paul: I'm remixing in my head at each stage of this.
Amar Paul: Okay, I'm gonna do… I've been reading a lot of books… a lot of books… a lot of poems… a lot of books. I'm gonna dig mine off the dome.
Amar Paul: Man lies.
Amar Paul: Wait, let me start over.
Amar Paul: Man climbs banana tree. Man falls from banana tree. Man lies in dirt.
Amar Paul: Man stares at sky. Sky tessellates through tree tremors. Man says to no one.
Amar Paul: I've never seen a day more beautiful than this one.
Amar Paul: Man lies.
Amar Paul: Wait, let me start over. Man sits on airplane for 14 hours. Man gets off airplane. Man has never been happier to see dirt. Man lies in dirt. Someone says to man, hey man, that's my yard, get the fuck out.
Amar Paul: Man says to no one, how can you own dirt? It's dirt.
Amar Paul: Man moves into apartment, dirt moves into apartment, man sweeps. Dirt moves into apartment, man sweeps. Dirt moves into apartment, man applies for green card. Man is denied green card. Man, why is it even called a green card? Dirt moves into apartment, man sweeps dirt into garbage bag. Garbage bag is green, green is garbage bag.
Amar Paul: I didn't want a green part. This country is garbage anyway. Nan, many years in the future, says.
Amar Paul: To me, there is no piece of paper more powerful than a U.S. passport.
Amar Paul: Except for maybe the U.S. dollar.
Amar Paul: Man lies. Wait, let me start over.
Amar Paul: Man sits at dinner, too.
Amar Paul: Kids take each other on your dinner table. Man says to them, if you don't finish your food, a tiger will come eat it and then eat you. I said, no. It happened to me once. Tiger chased me up a banana tree. I climbed and climbed and climbed until I forgot to be afraid.
Amar Paul: Man lies. Wait, let me start over. Daughter says to man, look, I drew this for you.
Amar Paul: Man says to daughter, oh, what is it? Daughter says to man, it's a banana tree.
Amar Paul: Man looks at drawing.
Amar Paul: Man remembers.
Amar Paul: How could any piece of paper be more powerful than this?
Amar Paul: Man says to daughter, it's futurable.
Amar Paul: Man lies. Thieves, it is true.
Amar Paul: Wait, let me start over. Daughter says to man, where'd we get this pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution?
Amar Paul: Man says to daughter, they gave it to me when I became a citizen.
Amar Paul: Daughter says, oh, they gave that to you for free? Man says to daughter, being a citizen in this country is never free.
Amar Paul: Man tells the truth.
Amar Paul: Wait, let me start over. Nothing here is true. Except the sun through the trees. Except the stories that we're made of.
Amar Paul: And so, I eat my dinner.
Amar Paul: And so I eat my history, and so I become this world, a place to start over. Not a blank canvas, not a forgetting, but a remembering. A story in perpetual motion, something that never stops moving is something that is never the same twice, and so I say to anyone who will listen, I have never seen a day more beautiful than this.
Amar Paul: Dad.
Amar Paul: This book was published in print. My mom was like, wasn't it a coconut tree that Dad was always talking about? I was like, oh my god.
Amar Paul: So memory is valuable.
Amar Paul: …
Amar Paul: But, yeah, I think, one thing that I wanted to call out in that poem is that I talked about the idea of, like, forgetting or blank canvas in starting over, but, and I really reject that idea. Toni Morrison has a book of essays called Playing in the Dark, and in that book, she talks about, race in America, and she talks about this conception of, like.
Amar Paul: whiteness in America, and how,
Amar Paul: white settler colonizers came to the new world, and they were like, there's nothing here, it's a fresh start, it's a blank canvas to start over. And, …
Amar Paul: just how wrong and misguided the colonialist mindset that was. And so I think I would really… I'd use…
Amar Paul: this book as a way to investigate and interrogate my personal history and our collective histories, but really through, like, things that my family has said to me, like, using those as a starting point to move forward and try to
Amar Paul: understand what has come before me, because it's not on my canvas, there's really something there.
Amar Paul: Okay, in… oh, okay, sure. In the shape of, history, I'm gonna read you guys… is it okay if I read you a poem that's not in the book? Yeah! Yeah, I'm gonna read you a poem that was mine.
Amar Paul: Also, like, I think maybe the first poem that I ever performed for anyone, which was… I took a poetry class in college.
Amar Paul: At Case Western Windsor University, shouts out.
Amar Paul: And, … I wrote this poem there, and it's about my backyard of my Cleveland apartment there, and …
Amar Paul: then they published it on a farm called Gaining Ground in Concord, Massachusetts, and they printed it out on this thing. I would highly recommend, checking out that farm.
Amar Paul: But yeah, this poem is not in the book, but it is very… it means a lot to me.
Amar Paul: Fruits at the end of the world.
Amar Paul: This is a eulogy, although it might not sound like one.
Amar Paul: Someone much wiser than I once said, a peach cannot defeat the monster that eats down the door.
Amar Paul: This morning, I looked at the peach tree bordering my backyard, the branches heavy with fruit.
Amar Paul: Is that how Atlas looked? Lynn bowed with the weight of the word, the world, the worry.
Amar Paul: Tender spots of orange and yellow and pink and red and magenta dotted its branches. So many, so much, so full, so furtive, that I could barely comprehend the mountains at its roots.
Amar Paul: There were enough rotted peaches there to make you wonder who could possibly eat them all. Surely not the squirrels, the deer, the blue jays vanished into the sound of construction across the street.
Amar Paul: Through my open window, I heard the sickeningly saccharine, sweet, sorry song, the decomposition, drift into the kitchen.
Amar Paul: Erotic peach decays like this.
Amar Paul: A bruise on the outside, spreading sinister. A misplaced footstep ooze impossible into treads. Flesh, flesh, golden and yellow and brown and gone. A rotting planet decays like this. A hole in clouds.
Amar Paul: Spreading sinister, a thunder of footprints, ozone impossible into space.
Amar Paul: Lesh, lesh, golden, yellow, and brown, and gone. Here's what remains.
Amar Paul: elaborate.
Amar Paul: promise.
Amar Paul: Peach could.
Amar Paul: Impeach not to beat the monster that beats down the door.
Amar Paul: But when I opened it, it was myself, and she asked me for forgiveness.
Amar Paul: I'm sorry.
Amar Paul: It's sticky, and sour, and sometimes sweet.
Amar Paul: And it tastes… Like a peach.
Amar Paul: Thank you for indulging me. That, the peach cannot defeat the monster that beats down the door is actually aligned by…
Amar Paul: Master Shifu, Kung Fu Panda One. We're going to finally recommend…
Amar Paul: I can control my, …
Amar Paul: One thing that my brother and I used to do when we were younger is we would watch a movie, like, we'd get a DVD from the library, we'd watch the movie, and then we would say, like, okay, this is my favorite part, this is my favorite part, and then we'd rewind it to that part, and then we'd just re-watch it.
Amar Paul: my knowledge of many movies during that time is just so deep. And, you know, there's a lot of repetition in my poems and in my life, but I called Umr after I had written that poem, and I was like.
Amar Paul: I think I read that part, and he was like, oh yeah, Master Jifu does say that, and I'm like…
Amar Paul: Okay.
Amar Paul: This next phone is…
Amar Paul: An ephrases. So, an ephrases is a poem that is written after a piece of art. Sometimes it can be, like, written after a visual, like a visual painting, it can be written after a song that's written after experiencing that, or, like, in the experience of that.
Amar Paul: And there was this exhibit at the Harvard Carpenter Center called Please Stay Home. It's really thematic. And, it just, it really stuck with me because there was an exhibition there, and then,
Amar Paul: a moderated panel afterwards on the art, and … I don't know, I just really like this poem a lot, and I don't get a chance to read it in many places, because it's kind of weird, but it's like… it's like a weirdness that…
Amar Paul: like, Daryl Ellis, the artist, his art was also kind of weird, and so I just am like, a lot in shape to that.
Amar Paul: Ekphrasis, after the moderated panel on the exhibition, Please Stay Home at Harbourks Carpenter Center, free to all, featuring the work of Daryl Ellis, who died of AIDS in 1992.
Amar Paul: He was told that the ink washes he was doing were not innovative enough.
Amar Paul: He wanted to make bigger Earth.
Amar Paul: He reflected. He was very poetic. He felt like an outsider. He was a classically figurative painter. He was interested in the figure in the way that was away from the others.
Amar Paul: He sat with the jar to shoot him.
Amar Paul: He was shot.
Amar Paul: He created a painting afterwards. He saw everything. He paid homage to the past. He was transforming his present. His past is transforming him. He brought activity from the shadows. The blacks are alive. He has created a body of work with contingencies, seriality. He resists the canon. He created untitled lore on Easter Sunday. He is exploding sets of materiality
Amar Paul: into the object. He's providing to us what we thought was experimental. It's just the start.
Amar Paul: He is representative of the city. He was not representative of the city. He was the archive.
Amar Paul: He is the ghost machine. He is the ghost. He is superhuman. He is more than a mind. He doesn't mind. He's just a body, after all. He brings the work to life. He captures the liveliness of the scene. He lived. He is dead.
Amar Paul: He is a story with a million threads waiting to be pulled. He was a man, but now he is a ball of yarn. He transformed his presence so much that we regret to inform you he's no longer with us.
Amar Paul: He transformed his presence so much that we regret to inform you he's no longer with us. He didn't die, he transformed. He transformed into HIV positive. He transformed into AIDS patients, he transformed into a body. He was, you know, he was possessed by the past.
Amar Paul: He used photos.
Amar Paul: He remembered someone else's memories. He disappeared into the work. He is in the negatives. He's just in the dark one. Shall I fetch him? He didn't make prints of his father's work. He made contact sheets. He has a father. He did not meet his father. He had a father. He reacts against the father. He uses his father's art as a beginning. He used his father's art as an end. He began. He ends.
Amar Paul: He does not destroy, he regenerates.
Amar Paul: He was methodical, he took photographs, he wasn't interested in photography, he made plaster reliefs, he used bandages. He had to do everything in a makeshift way. He took photographs, he sculpted, he painted, he created. He was fascinated by the possibilities. He dreamt. He dreamt. He dreamt. He dreams.
Amar Paul: Okay? One thing I forgot to say about that poem is all of the, like, 99% of the lines in that poem are things that
Amar Paul: the panelists said about his work. And it was interesting because, like, because he was dead, they talked about it in both the present tense and the past tense. Or, like, when you talk about an artist's work, it…
Amar Paul: Like, he writes about, he paints, like.
Amar Paul: The subjects are still a lot.
Amar Paul: Even if the artist is dead.
Amar Paul: So that's why, like, the way that it's organized on the page is it's, like, the past tense is on the left, and the present tense is on the right.
Amar Paul: … Oh, wow. Okay.
Amar Paul: On the topic of death.
Amar Paul: I have another poem about that, it's a little heavier, just a warning, and…
Amar Paul: Yeah. Oh, and one other thing that I'll say before I say this call is that, I incorporate phone calls a lot in my work, or, like, voicemails, as you saw, and…
Amar Paul: I don't know, it's just a reminder to you tonight to call someone that you love and tell them that you love them.
Amar Paul: I dream my mother on her deathbed in the…
Amar Paul: It's a dream I've had before.
Amar Paul: in the way that I'm a child that my mother has had before, in the way that both are nightmares.
Amar Paul: And in this dream, I'm looking at them.
Amar Paul: And when was the last time I looked at my mother and saw her for who she was, and not for what my memory made her?
Amar Paul: My memory made her tall and glamorous and angry and intimidating and loving and gentle and homestyle.
Amar Paul: But I find, in this place, that if memory has made her all those things, then un-memory has made her hair against
Amar Paul: And wretched at the lips. And she's shorter than I am, but I don't remember when that happened. And they won't let her wear earrings here, and glance. No, Mom, I really mean it. I'm not just saying that to make you happy.
Amar Paul: And maybe it's unfair of me to ask so much of memory when she no longer has hers. I dreamed my mother on her deathbed, and she was 50… she once told me she was ready to die because she had done everything she wanted to in life.
Amar Paul: And she was 53 when she said that, but I guess when she said that, I was 17, and I was ready to die, too. I dreamed my mother on her deathbed hand. The last time we had a conversation, we were on the phone, and we were arguing about something stupid. I don't even remember one, and a stranger overheard me and said, oh, I know that conversation.
Amar Paul: And she was just a stranger on the street. But if she had asked what we were fighting about, I would have told her. The same thing all mothers and daughters fight about. How to survive. I dream my mother on her deathbed, and when I was born, I nearly killed her.
Amar Paul: When she had me, I almost died. My mother dreamt me on her death… on my deathbed, and I survived. I dream my mother on her deathbed, and she doesn't. And our two lives have been one slow suicide act ever since.
Amar Paul: I dream my mother on her deathbed, Anne. My mother dreams me on my deathbed, Anne. I dream our deathbeds are the same, and our houses were the same ones, and our bodies were the same ones, and our memories may never, ever be the same again, but is it so extraordinary to imagine that our dreams might be different?
Amar Paul: I dreamed my mother on her deathbed.
Amar Paul: It's a dream I've always had, and always will have.
Amar Paul: a reassurance.
Amar Paul: Because it's easier to have this dream
Amar Paul: And to have this world without you.
Amar Paul: Okay, … while I was doing that poem, I saw Brianna in the back and mouthing the words.
Amar Paul: I love you so much. Yeah, the first time that I, like, performed that… well, no, not the first time, but I slammed that poem at Northeast 2022 in this room, so I feel like there's, like, a lot of weight to it, so thank you all for being here.
Amar Paul: Okay, I think I'm just gonna do, … I'm gonna do two more columns.
Amar Paul: mixed up instead of this. Yeah, okay, I'm gonna do two more poems, and they're both… they're both somewhat short. And then afterwards, we have Pate.
Amar Paul: Okay, I'll say… I'll repeat this again. But afterwards, we have cake, and also there's an activity that you can do outside, which my mom will tell me more to tell later.
Amar Paul: Alright, we're running, right?
Amar Paul: Oh yeah, so as I said, I don't… I don't speak Gujarati, but I've been trying to learn it, and this…
Amar Paul: A little bit about that, but my mom's language is… my mom's family language is Guidrafi, and my dad's family language is Moyalam, and this poem has a word from both.
Amar Paul: Native speaker.
Amar Paul: This language is law.
Amar Paul: No, this language is German.
Amar Paul: No, this language is red, red, red, bloody mouth, all dying languages made gray cotton tea.
Amar Paul: A prayer before my lips can make a sound. This language is red as the tongue, fleshy, frightened, feeble, the only muscle I know how to flex, and it can't carry a damn thing except all this history. When a language dies, the last words to go are the polos.
Amar Paul: When the lady on the bus tells me she doesn't see color, does she know she is killing something between us?
Amar Paul: This language is red. Love. Jump. This language is read as lineage. My mother's worry, my father's patience. Or the words that can't describe either, but we still try.
Amar Paul: This language is dead. Like, every day we destroy it and make it something new. This language is red like the fire in which it burned. This language is read as rebirthed. This language is spoken. It is not read.
Amar Paul: I am standing in the kitchen with six native speakers of Guadrakan, and I find none of them know how to read and write the language.
Amar Paul: It doesn't exist anywhere in this home, except between our laughter and defined our teeth.
Amar Paul: Then I'm gonna do last one, pretty short, but maybe before I do this, I will say, okay, sorry, what is the art activity? I'm ready for the season.
Amar Paul: Just going along with your home.
Amar Paul: doodling. Oh, yeah. I just have people want to write a little… a little skit poem of whatever home means to them. It's out there? It's already out there, people have been doing it. Okay, nice. And then the other one is, I would like to get everybody's handprints. One piece is okay.
Amar Paul: Okay, I'll be spared. Okay, cool. That's far out there, as far as…
Amar Paul: Okay, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this last haul, which is gonna bring down the house, and then we're gonna…
Amar Paul: And then, yeah, we'll do art, eat cake, put away chairs, and, oh, people can buy books, and I will sign books, and we have to be out of here by 9.30.
Amar Paul: I'm making eye contact with everyone.
Amar Paul: Let's get out of here if I'm not here. Okay, here we go, last one.
Amar Paul: Last week, we asked Daizun Mamun what the name Dezun meant, and he said.
Amar Paul: One you bow down to every time you see them.
Amar Paul: Which was just…
Amar Paul: so… funny. Something about the weight of the delivery sounded both so ironic and so genuine. Like, even if he was making it up, it was enough meaning to make new identity.
Amar Paul: So let me make myself joke, not pronounce punchline, but spoken like fresh way to discover the truth.
Amar Paul: With laughter behind the teeth. The next time someone asks me what my name means, I have half a mind to tell them it means, fuck off, or it means, do I look like an encyclopedia? Or it means, what does your name mean, Brenda?
Amar Paul: Or it means one you bow down to every time. Or it means enough gravity to draw us back to… or it means seeing syllables and knowing someone exists in the gap between them. Or it means laughter behind the teeth, or it means… do you get it? Or, my name is a part.
Amar Paul: I don't have the words for it yet, but I think it means…
Amar Paul: Don't go on.
Amar Paul: Let me know on the… because again, we have to be out of the…
Amar Paul: Oh, I told you I meant to countdown lounge every Wednesday.
Amar Paul: Thank you so much, and everybody, for coming.
Amar Paul: Okay, can you organize your hair stacking? Yeah, real quick, was there no Q&A? Was there no Q&A? No, there was no Q&A, but we're out of time. Yeah, just family, family photo, and then, … Oh, boy.
Amar Paul: A lot of people.
Amar Paul: Alright, get it, touch, tight, tight, tight, tight.
Amar Paul: Yeah, yeah, thank you.
Amar Paul: Yeah.
Amar Paul: You said, yeah.