Photography by Matt Gonzalez, Jeff Hunt, and Erin Lim Here at Storied: SF, we love poetry. Going back nearly all the way to our founding, poetry and poets have been an important part of what we do. And so, with a two-month art show at Mini Bar, Hungry Ghosts, we knew we wanted to include spoken-word arts. We reached out to some of the heaviest-hitting orators we've had on the show (full list here). And we ended up with a lineup for the ages: Kimi Sugioka (Alameda's poet laureate), Kim Shuck (SF poet laureate emerita), and friend of the show and all around bad-ass woman K.R. Morrison. A dozen or so of us huddled in the steamy backroom at Mini Bar that night, settling in amid the waning hours of an 80-degree evening, and got treated to poetry mostly related to the theme of rebirth, the underlying motif of Hungry Ghosts. Here's one of the poems Kimi read on Wednesday: "day of the dead" A spinning of webs and shadows of swings where child ghosts sing with rhyme and wing before their voices are muted by earth and stone The auntie preparing sushi The father winding his grandfather clock the audacious daughter diving into river, pool or sea fully clothed and unrepentant Some thin veil cloaks the ether of was and is blended in a batter of marigold and pomegranate for consumption by the soul pickers and keepers who know how to speak the language of the dead keep their secrets wait for the unborn to resume their alchemy to continue unfinished missions and well worn wishes that will be summoned at first breath And this is one of the poems Kim Shuck read that night: "San Francisco" Pick any street corner Any Bench any Stoop Any fourth star In this city or over it Sit quietly You will hear the water of time Keys rattling Heart and innovation Ramaytush wonderings War and colonization and patience and the mint that only grows on the south side of that mountain right there You will hear the poetry of place Popcicle sticks scratching on the curb Clap songs and Jump rope spells and Chess moves Love curses Every night in some back room QR Hand reads the future and the past in autopsied phrases The Babar poems Bob Kaufman’s guerilla words shouted at the unsuspecting somewhere in North Beach The skyline mutters poems that have been and poems to come And if you stand in the Café La Boheme’s door too long You might hear Alfoncito yelling what we will choose to call a poem Old Wives Tales still hover faint along Valencia You can listen to the purring of the various fogs As they pad over Eureka and Noe peaks Wolo’s paintings comment quietly on every new show in Kerouac alley If your hearing is very good Ambrose’s dictionary runs on a loop in a certain bar On a certain bar stool And the faint laughter from Sam’s jokes will still grind Brett’s teeth Prayers for the plague victims In more languages than you can count Mumble down Grant and twine with the poems of the Unbound Feet Three There are songs of burying and unburying to be found all over the Richmond Every corner Every bench Every headstone under the sand at Ocean Beach Mary and Carol Lee and Paula talk story in classrooms at State, at tables in cafés turned to bars John’s words rattle justice Through the rusting bars of Alcatraz and the voices of those taken in Captain Jack’s War have made them into their own songs too More wealth in words Than in all of the great libraries that have ever been And finally, here's "The InSaints," by K.R. Morrison: to the InSaint a saint in their allegiance to artists rabid ruthless in revolution by microphone wild pen loud paint to the InSaint insane for her relentless wrestling with cemetaried living, the civilized dead who nest in burning churches starving for scripture that saves to the InSaint the bruised, back patched street protector, policed & caged their evicted street codes molested murdered arrested to the InSaint armed with courage & reason to rescue the queen hemmed inside his soul or the bold butch unleashing an honest man from her iron breast to his InSaint daughter, now a sex worker her vandalized bedtime stories trafficked by a vagrant father, drunk in her underpants annointed, InSainted – she dominates, invades men’s narrative it is her body, not for free her sex always comes with a price to the Beaten InSaint with weathered knuckles, those weathered by fists, the pummeled InSaint who craves sour blood in broken noses, who thirsts for swollen lips throbbing savage words and feral unspeakable secrets to the Sinner InSaint, disappointed in this world’s repetition, who basks in dirty water baptisms, hungry for a wilderness god, for afterlives where mouths are stitched with pearls stolen by pirates where eyes are cataracted by clouds made by ferocious angels fallen to every InSaint waging war in a world captured by tyrants and savage humans I hear your fire from glittering trenches I wave your flag and with every battle I pledge my allegiance. We'll end this recap with a nice little video that Erin Lim (Bitch Talk Podcast) captured of K.R. reading. Support your local poet!
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