The OGQ

LITTLE DID I KNOW

By Freeman Ng

Excerpts from the book reprinted with permission of Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I quickly learned the story of the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese immigrants wanting to enter the country between 1910 and 1940 were detained while their claims to be exempt from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act were investigated. When I was in my thirties, that history became concrete for me when a friend I’d known since high school as Tim Chin changed his name to Tim Lee, because Chin was the paper name his father had used to enter the country and before his father died, he asked his son to return to their actual family name. After my own father died some years later, I learned belatedly that I had an even more personal connection to the history: my father had entered the country through a process similar to the one used at Angel Island, except by way of Seattle.

By then, I was working hard to get published as a novelist, but despite knowing the Angel Island history and having these connections, I was never interested in writing about that episode of Chinese American history, because I didn’t identify strongly with my Chinese heritage. Then I learned about the poems detainees carved into the walls of their barracks that expressed their anger and despair over the prison-like conditions and treatment they were subjected to and the unfairness and long delays of the examination process they had to undergo, and as a writer who identified primarily as a poet, I decided to write their story after all—in verse.

Based on what I knew at the time, I imagined my novel would tell the simple, perennial tale of immigrant hope in the face of systemic xenophobia. The arc of the story would be my characters overcoming those obstacles to reach the lower slopes of Gold Mountain, the American dream of economic prosperity. Little did I know that the novel would end up being about so much more that the chapter immediately following its climax would begin with the following lines:

And now
all that remains
is to pass
our interrogations,
which I once thought
would be the climax
of my story but now
feels more
like an epilogue.

The novel still tells the default story of Chinese immigration through Angel Island—the barrier of the exclusion act, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire that forced cracks in it, the paper stories detainees tried to pass through them, and the ordeal of the examination process and the conditions of detention—but it turned into something bigger, due to two story elements that started off as peripheral and ended up becomingpivotal.

Boocher

Though there’s no record of any Black person working at the immigration station, it was not an impossibility, and I decided to stretch historical likelihood to serve the historical truth of the existence of other oppressed groups in America at the time. I put a Black teenage kitchen worker into my story, derogatorily nicknamed “Boocher” by the white station staff, and used him to show my Chinese detainees behaving unjustly toward groups they saw as having even less power than they did.

I thought he’d perform that function and then fade from the pages of the book. Little did I know that he would land on its cover.

Once I admitted Boocher into my fictional world, his interactions with the other characters and his importance to emerging, unforeseen themes of the novel grew to the point that his B story became the A story, my protagonist’s conflict with him the crisis whose resolution is the climax of the book.

This transformation was catalyzed by the second big surprise of the writing process:

The Go Board

On my first visit to the Angel Island Immigration Station, which has been staged to show how various rooms might have looked when the station was in use, I was surprised and then not surprised by the presence of a Go board in one of them. Of course there would be a Go board. Go, the chess of East Asia, was invented in China over two thousand years ago, and is the oldest known board game that’s been played continuously to the present day.

I play Go, and decided, purely for my own satisfaction, in homage to the game I love, to have my protagonist Tai Go play it as well. But that was as far as I initially planned to go. I thought I’d insert that little bit of product placement and that would be it. Little did I know, the game of Go and its strategic principles would become the key to Tai Go finding his way to the end of the novel and his own version of an American dream.

In the course of the novel, he plays two games against his grandfather, and then there’s a scene in which his grandfather analyzes the second game they played. This third scene occurs at a point when Tai Go’s path seems to be completely blocked, but the lesson he learns from that analysis, the Go proverb that “only surrounded groups [of Go stones] can be killed,” becomes the light that guides his path through the rest of the story.

As if
the board were shaken
and all the stones
resettled into their exact
previous positions
but somehow different, I see,
for the first time, the shapes
of my stones.

The Half-Japanese Girl

Another character I introduced to show my Chinese characters’ prejudice against certain other groups was a half-Chinese, half-Japanese girl housed with the women and children in a separate building on the grounds, with whom Tai Go makes regular eye contact through the chain link fence enclosing the Chinese men’s rec yard. He establishes a correspondence with her through secretly passed letters and comes to believe he’s destined to be the classic “guy who gets the girl.”

Little does he know that he’s actually the antagonist in her story.

He wrongs her in an unforgivable way, and is not, as he might have been in some default stories, forgiven. He accepts this outcome, because by this point in the novel, he understands that his story is no longer the simple one he started with. He’s entered a new moral world with more complex demands on his allegiances.

Sow Fong and I
play Ping-Pong, cards, the game
with the ball and two goals
in the yard. We don’t
see Yukiko again
on her bench or find
any more letters from her
beneath the shrub.

Good riddance!
says Sow Fong,
and I find a sense
in which I can agree with him
wholeheartedly.

I was not
the hero of my own story.
I was the villain
of another’s.

The Walk Back

In the end, Tai Go has a final encounter with the Black teen kitchen worker he thought was his enemy and learns Boocher’s real name, his own actual role in the drama they’ve been enacting, and that “my ignorance / means nothing.”

On the walk back
to the barracks, through tears—
I haven’t cried
since I was six—every inch
of the grounds, every board
and brick of the buildings,
the sky itself look exactly
like they did before and yet
completely different, like the stones
on Grandfather’s board, or glances
exchanged across a distance,
or the sound of a name
you thought
you knew.

He resolves to struggle, not just for his own happiness or the success of his own people, but for “all The People / in their groups like stones / on a hostile board.”

It’s a scene I could not have imagined in the initial stages of the writing, before Boocher and the game of Go asserted their centrality to my story, expanding its reach. These kinds of walk-backs (or perhaps more accurately, walkabouts) are the journey of fiction, of poetry, of all creative endeavor. We set off down paths that call to us, not knowing where they lead, and “learn by going where we have to go.”

Freeman Ng is the author of Bridge Across the Sky (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Simon & Schuster, 2024), a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and winner of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia’s 2024 Freeman Award for high school literature, and the co-author, with Peter Dale Scott, of Poetry and Terror (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), a discussion of Scott’s book length poem Coming to Jakarta (New Directions, 1989) that Robert Hass called “the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time.” Freeman is also the writer of the Trumpbert political webcomic and Haiku Diem, a daily haiku feed. www.AuthorFreeman.com

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I listen to the moon but it doesn’t say much about my life.
Quiet night is for my cockatoo. He keeps chattering
until my neighbor comes over to complain. Then I read
a local newspaper: no murder, no robbery, one grandmother
fell down the stairs and broke her hip. I lick my inky fingers
and order my imaginary chauffeur to get ready—I’ll visit her
and comfort her. I’d say, I read about you, I’m terribly sorry,
this is my cockatoo, he’s twelve and loves carrots.
We’d share her hospital dinner and be happy.
Other sick people gather around us, admiring my cockatoo,
who looks proud in his cage, unfurling his light-pink wings
like stage curtains, and I’m his assistant. Grandma,
worried that I’ve become silent, tells me how tired I look.
“I had a series of nightmares,” I say, “my boss returned
from the grave and fired me, bats attacked me like slow bullets
but bigger, I was bleeding.” She says: “When I’m alone,
I paint eyes on a pear and whisper, I’m watching over you.
That makes me stronger.” Back home, my body thin and healthy,
cooling my feet on a crystal ball like a psychic out of business,
I look out the window: I don’t know which leaves will fall first or why.
There aren’t many trees left. Not much is left of this little town.

Note:
“Prognosis at Midnight” is the opening poem of my first full-length collection, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). I wrote it shortly after moving to Austin, and it was the first piece I brought to workshop with the late Dean Young, who also taught at the Community of Writers.

The poem’s title echoes Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” where a father addresses his sleeping child, ending with the line: “Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.” But for my speaker, the moon is irrelevant, and instead of a child, he has a noisy parrot. The poem was inspired by one of Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, which features a cockatoo and a newspaper as its background.

Yuki Tanaka is the author of the debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. He has also co-translated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi (Princeton University Press, 2024). He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.

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ALL THAT’S MISSING

by Denise Ohio

Western red cedars are beautiful. They smell good, especially in the morning. In a strong wind, their boughs ripple like waves, and they shed snow as if setting down a picnic basket. Where the roots rise up from underground, the red-brown bark becomes an array of turning, shifting lines that gently swirl up and straighten out as they climb.

These lovely trees also produce a rot-resistant fungicide that protects the wood, making it perfect for window frames, siding, and shakes. It is especially good for roof shingles. But how cedar trees are turned into cedar shingles is terrifying.

I needed shingle-cutting footage for my film, Verona: The Story of the Everett Massacre (Virgil, 2017). This feature documentary explores a 1916 strike that turned into a free speech fight that escalated into a shoot-out in Everett, Washington. Seven people were killed, dozens wounded, and several more went missing after falling from the steamship Verona as it pulled into the City Dock.

On a spring day in 2014, I filmed a shingle sawyer with a 1908 Sumner Ironworks shingle machine. I’ve been in lumber mills. I know how hard it is to take a full breath after working around acrid sawdust, and how your ears are numb by the sound of steel shrieking through wood. But this was something else.

The shingle sawyer stood facing the thirty-two-inch waist-high clipper saw. On his left, a carriage slid a two-foot-long cedar bolt into another thirty-two-inch blade. The carriage moved back, tilting the bolt slightly so the face is cut at an angle to taper each shingle.

Without looking, the sawyer took the slices with his left hand, passed them to his right, butted the ends, and then slid them into the arm above the clipper saw. Pushing down without seeing the blade, he trimmed one side square, flipped over the shingles one-handed, trimmed the opposite side, and then spun each shingle into a different chute based on grade.

The sawblades spin so fast, they can take your hand before you know you’re hurt. The sawyer had no injuries to his arms or hands, which he insisted was dumb luck. Then he repeated what I’ve heard dozens of times: you know someone’s a shingle weaver by his missing fingers.

“Shingle weaver” originally meant the worker who packed cedar shingles into bundles so quickly, it looks like they’re weaving the shingles together. But the nickname covered everyone working in the mill, from the man who shoveled scrap into the boiler fire to the man selecting logs from the millpond to the man running the kneebolter saw to the man who sharpened the sawblades to the man who actually cut the shingles. If you worked turning a cedar into a piece of roofing, you were a shingle weaver.

In 1916, Everett was the capital of the shingle trade, where almost every mill cut and packed over a million shingles every shift. The mill owners were never able to stabilize production, so the shingle weavers cycled through unemployment followed by constant, furious work. At least the job paid well because of the union. Just as everyone who worked in the mill was a shingle weaver, every shingle weaver belonged to the same union.

This was unusual. The shingle weavers’ union was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, and almost all AFL unions were limited to white men and organized by trade. For instance, railroad engineers and conductors had separate unions. If the conductors went on strike, the engineers would cross their picket line to keep working.

But this wasn’t true for the shingle weavers. When they went on strike, everyone went on strike. The shingle weavers were tough, outspoken, and militant.

Equally militant were the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was an industrial union, wanting to do for every industry what the shingle weavers had done for theirs. The AFL shingle weavers and the IWW were aligned so closely, the shingle weavers even fought amongst themselves about leaving the AFL for the IWW.

So when the shingle weavers went on strike in May 1916, alongside the conflict between workers and mill owners, there was tension between AFL and IWW supporters. Conflict wasn’t unique to the shingle weavers or Everett. In 1916–17, the United States saw almost three thousand strikes, many met with arrests, beatings, and killing.

In Everett, the violence around the strike escalated when over four hundred citizens were deputized under Sheriff Don McRae and the Commercial Club. Sensing an opportunity, IWWs arrived to speak on the city’s traditional free speech corner about industrial unionism and how much they hated the AFL. As deputies harassed and arrested speakers, more IWWs showed up. Then locals stepped onto the soapbox, people like boardinghouse owner Telsie Fye, who, after reciting the Declaration of Independence, ran when a deputy came to arrest her.

As everyone was drawn into the IWW free speech fight, the shingle weavers lost their local support. Deputies, city cops, and strikebreakers kept harassing the men on the picket line, but no one noticed. The shingle weavers had been abandoned.

That’s what’s happened to most labor history—it’s been abandoned. Workers’ stories are missing from classrooms and history books. They’re missing from the big and small screen. And what has been remembered is often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Most of the people who have heard of the Everett Massacre know only an incomplete version of the archival record. Or worse, they make shit up and call it history.

This is not critical fabulation or the conscious choice to imagine events to find meaning in them. This is wishful thinking presented as fact. The laziness is annoying and the dishonesty infuriating. When it comes to the shoot-out on the City Dock, what actually happened is sadder and more interesting than any made-up story I’ve heard so far.

For example, I spent a lot of time looking for information about a man named Hugo Gerlot, whose last name was actually Hugo Gerlat. The lore, repeated for decades, says that Hugo shinnied up on the flagstaff at the front of the Verona and was waving his hat at the crowd as the ship pulled up to the dock. Right after the first shots were fired, he crashed to the passenger deck with two bullets in his head.

But there’s no evidence anyone was on the flagstaff, much less fell like a working-class Icarus. What I did find were notes saying witnesses had identified Hugo as one of the men shooting from the Verona, testimony of his painful death as he lay on the deck calling for help, and that his younger brother unsuccessfully sought help getting Hugo’s body home to Milwaukee.

Another often repeated story involves the death of Deputy Jeff Beard. Even labor historians have repeated the falsehood that Beard was shot in the back by friendly fire. This is simply not true. Not even IWW propaganda of the time said this. Court testimony says Beard was shot in the chest, the bullet that killed him was embedded in his vertebra, and it took a hammer and chisel to get it out.

We all create narratives to fill in the gaps of stories. I do myself, but I know the difference between fact and fiction. When my research revealed that the received history was wrong, sometimes wildly so, the question I wanted to answer in my film became exactly what happened?

I tried to answer this question as best I could in Verona. The historical record is always incomplete but that doesn’t mean it can be forced into any convenient shape. Part of what’s incomplete is how people felt and how they justified their prejudices and actions. When talking history, I’m not willing to guess about the inner workings of the human heart. For me, why real people do what they do—their true motives—belongs to fiction.

Fiction allows me to explore answers to unknowable questions. Why did the mill owners not follow through on their promises? Why did the sheriff, a union man, turn against his union brothers? Why did the IWW decide this was the place to take a stand? Why did some people do the right thing while others looked away? Why did the man who fired the first shot pull the trigger?

And who were the people who fell into the bay? History records them only as “missing.”

All that’s missing has never left me.

So in 2022, I began a series of novels. Each volume contains multiple point-of-views, and all the main characters finish their journeys as participants or witnesses to the shooting. Each journey builds on choices the character makes that brings them to this place and time, things I don’t think anyone can ever really know in the historical sense. But I can know it in the imaginative sense. This is where my art lives, in the space around history where once-upon-a-time can reveal unexpected truths. The past, which is never really past, requires imagination to find meaning.

I don’t know if I’ll succeed with this project and frankly, I’m not sure yet what I mean by success. I know that these are stories demanding to be told. I know I’m not done with what happened on November 5, 1916. I know that beautiful Sunday afternoon on Port Gardner Bay was made ugly by hate and violence and blood in the water. And I know it didn’t have to be.

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I’ve been steeped in politics for a minute. Four years, to be exact. But who’s counting?
White people. Men. Bankers. The Landlord. The landed. The rich. The gerontocracy
which calls itself the United States Congress.

And in this 249th year of the republic, with another civil war feeling imminent, such is our Zuckerberg Address:

For the billionaire, by the billionaire.
By the power vested in Meta.

That school my wife founded?
We’re closing it at the end of the academic year.

That billion in housing we pledged?
We’re offshoring needs elsewhere.

And yet, as cruel and usual the status quo may seem, this need not be the face of government.

What humbling, haunting gift. To become a public servant. Councilman at 26. Mayor at 29.

To return to your hood after eight years pursuing higher ed—a bachelor’s at Duke, a two-year stint writing poems in New York, another at Oxford. A master among masters.

To shake hands with ambassadors, dignitaries. To speak Latin in the halls where Harry Potter was filmed.

To return. To be able to return.

To an America both foreign and familiar. To bear witness to what was always there now being laid bare. What is the face of justice in the time of COVID? Your hood gentrified; your parents divorcing, and it clicks why your dad slept on the couch all those years; men in hard hats taking pictures of the house you grew up in; the fires burning outside; the fire this time; the demolished malls; a sworn officer kneeling on a man’s American neck for eight minutes, forty-six seconds; an invisible virus infecting your neighbors, furloughing your father.

To see California’s forests ash the sky—a burning red, as orange as the president.
To witness, as Lucille said, all the ways this country tries to kill you.

This constant whiplash. Between laurel and lament. This is the cross we are to bear. Our original skin.

My father’s crossing was deemed illegal, then pardoned, by the same government.
My birth. By the random circumstances of place. Deemed American.

MALE. 03/22/1994. The certificate reads. KAISER FOUNDATION. 1150 VETERANS.
8 LBS, 9 OZ. At the bottom is the seal of the doctor. The county clerk assessor.

Mi hijo. Un Americano. Un ciudadano. De East Palo Alto.
The right to vote. The freedom of movement.

And yet, even as I write this, the Supreme Court is to weigh in on whether a baby born in our nation’s hospitals constitutes birthright.

And yet, how razor-thin that border between entry and denial is.

Under these conditions, one has no choice but to run. For our children. For our children’s children. For public office.

And yet, even with this cross to bear, I carried privilege too, hauled it, like the two 50-pound pieces of luggage that accompanied me to Duke. What a fluke. Pops staying up to hand me orange peels. The Sheraton manager letting me work on my physics homework on one of the poolside tables. A Yoplait yogurt swiped from the minibar. The cooks, sneaking me an extra quesadilla.

And down the road of El Camino, my new school. Menlo. Mark Clevenger. My college counselor. My English teacher. My mentor introducing me to the world of fiction, Tobias Wolff, Shirley Jackson, David Sedaris, John Cheever. He who paid for all my testing preps, for my three-leg flight across the country. Oakland, to LAX, to ATL, Raleigh-Durham.

I wasn’t born to do this. By serendipity and scholarship, I’ve been fortunate to be forged in this crucible of guns and brass. This experiment of empire and the denizens it grants.

Let’s talk about citizenship. Literary and otherwise. How politics seeped into my skull long before I took my oath to protect and defend against all enemies domestic and domestic. Of white supremacists elected president. Let’s talk loco. Let’s talk local.

Being in the thick of meetings, watching bureaucracy constrain, even dehumanize—it forces the question: how do we honor lived experience within these strictures? The structures of governance, like poetic forms—a sestina, a sonnet—often carry their own baggage. Racial, ideological. The poet’s job, perhaps like the engaged citizen’s, isn’t to negate these forms. It’s to build on them, riff, play trickster. To smuggle one’s own songs. To beguile. To haunt the tradition. Belie its limits, stretch it, more than a homegirl’s piece of gum.

I think of my work, my aesthetic, as a reform of form: bending civic language to carry our grief, our memories, our music branded by pundits and pendejos as foreign.

Here’s a memory of an analogy. As a kid, I’d watch Univision news clips. We’d gather around the hunchback tele like a bonfire, its pixel glowing on our brown faces. We’d hear promises of Reforma Inmigratoria recited by my family like a prayer. Praying for papeles. I remember seeing Jorge Ramos, then youthful, as light-skinned as my sister, asking candidates of the free world their plans for the millions of immigrants. Immigrants like godfather Luis, like grandmother Carmen who jotted down the license plates of drug dealers on Fordham Ave, in an East Palo Alto of the 1990s, doing her part, immigrants like my cousin Maria whose family grew up with mine in that one-story hut on Pulgas Ave.

The promise broken each time. Every time.
But who’s counting? Who doesn’t get to count. Every four years.

I think of what I do as a writer similarly: taking these received structures and making them familiar, making them home, giving them our laughs, our accents, our songs. This act of writing, as lonely as it is lovely, is the naturalization of tradition itself.

No wonder what came out of those four years of serving as a councilmember, then mayor, is “Proclamation,” a long love letter written in the form of a municipal resolution. To understand what led to this poem, however, I need to begin before the dais, before the laureateship. In classrooms. In council chambers. On long bus rides through invisible borders.

It’s an honor, then, to contribute to the Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, especially following my recent appointment as Poet Laureate for San Mateo County. My thanks to Andrew Tonkovich for the invitation. The Community of Writers holds a special place; it was my first literary conference, attended back in 2017 at the behest of my mentor, the acclaimed writer Rigoberto Gonzalez, and thanks to the Lucille Clifton Scholarship. I was 22, a wide-eyed poet starting my MFA at Rutgers-Newark. That opportunity, meeting luminaries, feeling welcomed, was formative. This new civic role deepens a question CoW helped spark: how does public service – its language, its duties, its ghosts – shape poetry?

“Proclamation” is the final poem of my forthcoming collection, The Right to Remain Violets. Here, I grapple with civic life and poetic expression by appropriating the formal language of governmental resolutions. The poem adopts the “WHEREAS” structure, using its accumulative power not for sterile declaration, but to build a layered, contradictory portrait of my hometown, East Palo Alto (EPA). It’s an attempt to stretch that civic form, make it hold the grief, resilience, and biting irony of a place often called “the most expensive hood in the world.” This, then, is the heart of my practice as a poetician: to weaponize the formality of civic speech against its own silences, to make its structures bear the weight of what they often exclude.

Roger Reeves noted, “The politician and the poet both traffic in illusion, revelation, concealment, metaphor, and pathos.” Navigating both worlds confirms this “double hailing.” From the dais, in community meetings, I see bureaucracy’s constraints: how procedures silence testimony, how the clock ticks down on packaged grief. In my mind, an anthology of Black and Brown mothers runs on loop. Waiting their two minutes at the microphone. Clutching statements rehearsed in mirrors. Their grief sometimes flattened by formality, by impassive official response. How, then, can poetry respond where bureaucracy falls short?

“Proclamation” uses the “WHEREAS” clause as a container, trying to hold what overflows: EPA’s history of segregation; jarring educational disparities; the ghosts of residents like Ralph Fields Jr., whose death at Jack Farrell Park in the summer of 2022 rippled through our community, into the very meetings meant to plan our future; the perennial debate of gentrification; the constant pressure of displacement.

I already feel my shoulder tapped for correction. By an activist who sat to my left at a quarterly roundtable meeting for nonprofits I recently attended.

“Antonio, it’s not displacement. It’s banishment.”

Each “WHEREAS” in the poem holds a fragment—of memory, indictment, or inherited tension—anchored in the real policies and conditions that have shaped East Palo Alto. One cites Rubén Ábrica, the city’s founding councilmember, recalling that “overnight, our city doubled the number of minorities in San Mateo County”—a reflection on how incorporation in 1983 turned EPA into a political scapegoat and statistical outlier within a predominantly white county.

Another invokes the long legacy of educational apartheid: “I still remember my big sis standing outside… freights of rogues waiting to be bused—the ETA from EPA to Belmont, two hours, back and forth”—a nod to court-mandated busing programs in the ’80s and ’90s that treated students of color as logistical problems to be solved, not communities to be supported.

One line collapses language and criminalization: “land of muggles, land of mug shots, of stupid scuffles, of getting got”—evoking the way Black and Brown kids are more often seen as threats than children.

Another line indicts the failures of safety in education: “trustee, do you fear… a classroom shot up with hands raised?”—an echo of real anxieties in communities where school lockdowns are a routine trauma.

And still another lashes out at the bureaucratic alphabet soup—“RHNA, SAFER Bay, CEQA, JPA… no mames, who got time to learn all this shit”—highlighting how planning acronyms often obscure the stakes of development, displacement, and disaster preparedness for the very people those plans claim to serve.

In a word, the poem plays trickster with form. It shifts from policy language to personal memory, from statistics (“most segregated city”) to embodied trauma (“motion to expunge our hearts at Jack Farrell Park”). It culminates not in a sterile resolution, but a defiant song. It calls roll of the living and the dead, claiming space in chambers where grief is often timed out: “NAW, ROGUE, BE IT A SONG… come juan, come jamal, report to the council chambers at city hall… Behold, the richest hood in the world, East Palo Alto.” It ends with me signing off as ‘Mayor’—a title I held for a year, from 2023 to 2024—wielding the title within the poem’s constructed authority.

Serving in public life reveals the limits of official language. Poetry alone cannot legislate change, but it can bear witness. It can stretch forms—civic or aesthetic—to hold complexity, trauma, resilience. It can “haunt the traditions back,” insisting on the presence of bodies and memories that protocols might marginalize. In a city shadowed by loss but defined by survival, poetry becomes a way to practice “commemorative vigilance,” keep the ghosts present, and insist, even within constraints, on the fullness of our stories.

In language, as in life, we ask the same question so many have posed before. Who gave their lives to this shared form.

Tonight, I am thinking of Baldwin.
How to stretch this “mortal envelope” until it sings?

COMMEMORATING THE CITY OF EAST PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA AS THE MOST EXPENSIVE HOOD IN THE WORLD

WHEREAS, a 2020 UC Berkeley study found that East Palo Alto is the most segregated city in the Bay Area, writing, This is not surprising; East Palo Alto was a historically Black community created from redlining and racial exclusion that limited where Black families could live in the region; and

WHEREAS, Rubén Ábrica, founding councilmember, at the black tie dinner celebrating our 40^th anniversary, said, Overnight, our city doubled the number of minorities in San Mateo County; and

WHEREAS, even Condoleezza said, If I can look at your zip code, tell whether you’re getting a good education; and

WHEREAS, in ‘91, Dr. Rice co-founded the Center for a New Generation, a chance for enrichment, for us kids from East Palo Alto, North Fair Oaks, Belle Haven; and

WHEREAS, in the summer of ‘08, a couple months shy of 8^th grade, I’d enroll, not yet afraid; and

WHEREAS, the sweat inside the portable, the wiggle of my knees, the really, really having to pee; and

WHEREAS, my four eyes racing up and down the times tables sheet, the double-check, the triple check;

WHEREAS, Pencils down, my spring up the seat; and

WHEREAS, I pass my paper to Janay, gold and purple planets locked onto her braids; and

WHEREAS, the hand she raised, Ey mistah, what if there’s nothing to correct?; and

WHEREAS, the T.A. peers over, uncrosses his arms, his red chest spells Stanford, Never seen a kid finish—every single one; and

WHEREAS, I jumped outta CNG, from gangs of kids who looked like me, but not before Field Trip Week; and

WHEREAS, first Mid-Pen, then Sacred Heart, One more left, Mr. T said, leafing through his clipboard; and

WHEREAS, the streets began to widen, we whirl into a world where bathrooms clean themselves, where fountains fill your mouth at the spine of a shelf, where the bell is never heard, as mythic as an elf;

WHEREAS, I think to myself—the mansion, the pool, the ivy leaves, all these whiz kids—what if Hogwarts existed; and

WHEREAS, Menlo School is to Azkaban as EPA’s to the town of Atherton; and

WHEREAS, the boy who lived, the boys who didn’t, must be fantasy, YA fiction; and

WHEREAS, land of muggles, land of mug shots, of stupid scuffles, of getting got; and

WHEREAS, land of tag you’re it, of grab his prints, of a fourteen-year old’s fingers as admissible evidence; and

WHEREAS, land of the headfake, land of the headline, of the front page, of getting by; and

WHEREAS, land of the courts, land of no net, of getting caught in its mane, of man, he’s dead; and

WHEREAS, land of I didn’t mean it like that, it was just a joke, of tailoring English, my invisible cloak; and

WHEREAS, I still remember my big sis standing outside, her whole class, 6:45, the corner a crown of jeans & Jan Sports, and perched atop the poles, a school of crows side eye our species’ strange mores: the freights of rogues waiting to be bused—the ETA from EPA to Belmont, two hours, back and forth; and

WHEREAS, mind the implicit gap of our sorting hat, that your house depends on where you live on the district map; and

WHEREAS, I was the only one in that bus who applied, who got in, who loaned all the test preps he could from the Menlo Park library, who timed himself with a stove oven clock, again & again, the four missing a finger, until the bubbles matched those in the answer key, and I unlocked the bathroom of Sacred Heart, the testing site, the stalls a vomit-green, & looking in the mirror said, You can do this, Tony; and

WHEREAS, I can still hear Janay, Malaysia, all the Black girls in the back of the bus, the chorus to their song more Greek than R&B;

WHEREAS, (Baby Don’t) Go, (Baby Don’t) Go, (Baby Don’t) Go, Baby, Go (x3) and

WHEREAS, who finished their B.A., who pled with the D.A, who kept the baby they nursed back in 8^th grade; and

WHEREAS, who dropped out, who got their GED, whose drip was a pair of Girbaud’s, whose was a hospital I.V.; and

WHEREAS, whose names are scrawled in Scholastics, whose in ballistics, who had no choice but to (be) minor(s) in statistics; and

WHEREAS, I replay the clip in my head, the ribbons of caution tape, Mrs. Fitch is pregnant, an oracle for a belly, she waddles around the womb, at random drawing names; and

WHEREAS, I still search for them, the classmates that took the stand, Marcel, Ake, Maryland; and

WHEREAS, those winter mornings at McNair, those foggy dawns, we’d wait so long for our teachers to come, smoke would escape our lungs; and

WHEREAS, I’ve spent my 20s doing the same, inhaling as much as I could from higher ed; and

WHEREAS, until the senator hired me, I paced the walls of his district office; and

WHEREAS, by spring, he is still unsure, by fall, he introduces me at the governor’s rally, And now, one of our state’s rising stars; and

WHEREAS, I do not wish to be a star, but part of a constellation of starved planets and naco knuckle-heads whose mothers slapped the bottom of their Buicks with stickers that said, My child is an honors student at Ronald Edison; and

WHEREAS, lest I forget, there are allies in this fight, like Simone Rick-Kennel, high school principal at TIDE, and the woman who began our meeting by saying, I read your book, Tony, and I want to tell you, I was there too that day of Fabián’s trial;

WHEREAS, my mind flashes, forward, for once, to a world where I stare into the eyes of a white woman and not doubt she’ll defend me—better yet, where I have nothing (left) to defend; and

WHEREAS, that April, one trustee motions to approve all curriculum save a single book; and

WHEREAS, this same trustee warns my poems will quote set precedent; and

WHEREAS, we continue to meet, the entire English faculty, Ms. Ceseña, Mr. Weathers, Ms. Valdez, this small conspiracy of bookworms; and

WHEREAS, our crime of makeup papers, dreams under desks, lesson plans, discussion questions; and

WHEREAS, journal reflections, writing prompts; and

WHEREAS, we prep for the school-wide reading of Gentefication in the fall; and

WHEREAS, trustee, do you fear the one white boy in class who speaks Spanish, and no one makes fun of his accent; and

WHEREAS, do you fear Carlos, the boy who at the end of the class gifted me my own name in graffiti; and

WHEREAS, do you fear a classroom shot up with hands raised; and

WHEREAS, do you fear the brown boys in black hoodies—who can’t stop staring at me; and

WHEREAS, do you fear they’ll turn from the white board to themselves; and

WHEREAS, do you fear the boy’s question, How you feel ’bout that kid Manitas that got killed; and

WHEREAS, do you fear the moment when the principal sits in their seats, when she has no answers, nor do I, and yet for the next for forty-five minutes, it’s our job to try; and

WHEREAS, point of order, trustee Ginn, these are our kids; and

WHEREAS, doesn’t it keep you up at night that they must live with what I did; and

WHEREAS, don’t you see, this is bigger than my book, than you or I’s beliefs, our children are watching us, our every weave; and

WHEREAS, through the chair, I ask you all to consider what we’ll lose, an earth of palms brown as the trees that greet me at Stanford; and

WHEREAS, this silicon mirage where I look around, & I’m the only Juan whose knees aren’t already in mud; and

WHEREAS, the week after the trustees’ vote is cast, I’m on a panel of local authors moderated by LaDoris Cordell, the only Black woman in her class of Stanford Law and the first to serve as a judge in Northern California;

WHEREAS, she cites the longlist of books banned in the United States. and says with a smirk, It is my hope your books will be too; and

WHEREAS, thanks to Shawneece, Alan and Chris—the two white men not seeking another term—the board of the Sequoia Union High School District passes my book, 3-2; and

WHEREAS, call for the question: the ayes have it, but for how long; and

WHEREAS, a 2022 report by Bay Area Equity Atlas mapped racial and economic segregation across our nine counties, 1,572 census tracts, & found that 1 in 10 neighborhoods are highly segregated areas of largely White wealth; and

WHEREAS, Concentrated white wealth is a major drive of socio-economic segregation in the Bay Area; and

WHEREAS, somewhere, in the ether of wherever we end up, Amiri’s still scatting away, Bu-de-daaaa. Bu-de-daaaa; and

WHEREAS, Stokely’s the next act, he’s less playful, but still chairman of SNCC, the year is ’67, the room packed & lit;

WHEREAS, In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience; and

WHEREAS, Incendiary Art; and

WHEREAS, Don’t Call Us Dead; and

WHEREAS, I carry at least one Smith at all times in my glove compartment;

WHEREAS, are you ready for this week’s grief; and

WHEREAS, like salve like salvo, like psalm, like sieve; and

WHEREAS, before taking roll call, the E.D. makes small talk with me & the rest of the board, It’s not their fault they’re from East Palo Alto; and

WHEREAS, I spent the first fourteen years of my life in public school, the second in private, each has unearthed is its own kind of violence; and

WHEREAS, I don’t have yearbook photos, I have these streets; and

WHEREAS, there are corners I can’t visit without beginning to weep; and

WHEREAS, Nazario Barajas, 18;

WHEREAS, José Luis Quiñonez, 16; and

WHEREAS, candles, spray paint, what of our remains; and

WHEREAS, a fire hydrant, a frame, a hummingbird above our names; and

WHEREAS, Jose Luis played football, a Wildcat; and

WHEREAS, Juan Carlos was funny, adventurous; and

WHEREAS, we are raising money for his funeral expense; and

WHEREAS, what’s it say that our stories are GoFundMe’s; and

WHEREAS, tell me, how do you live life to the fullest—at 14; and

WHEREAS, Izack Lopez, 3 months young;

WHEREAS, next of kin, next of skin; and

WHEREAS, Ralph Fields, slain by the swing sets;

WHEREAS, the cause of death, pushing his niece; and

WHEREAS, the video gone viral: a girl screaming mommy; and

WHEREAS, his name’s not yet released, pending notification of the deceased; and

WHEREAS, we all know it, 20 minutes into the meeting; and

WHEREAS, motion to expunge our hearts at Jack Farrell Park; and

WHEREAS, motion to reclassify the courtyard where Manitas got ____ ; and

WHEREAS, motion to reconvene under his mother’s arms;

WHEREAS, where shall we find life, our liberty; and

WHEREAS, this lanyard ’round my neck: live long, Inty; and

WHEREAS, fuck this odyssey, this ancient grease, that to be something, we gotta leave; and

WHEREAS, I’m tired of dying, I want to live, for the smile of my little brother, the lines we skip; and

WHEREAS, I want to make it past Tuesday, for Friday nights at Great America, for the sight of him going in on a funnel cake all Tony Montona; and

WHEREAS, picking him up from the school, wearing the Oxford hoodie I got ’cross the pool, he flips the script, What’d you learn in politics, feo; and

WHEREAS, You really wanna know, dude?; and

WHEREAS, Uh, oh yea sure; and

WHEREAS, We think in days, White folks every four years; and

WHEREAS, Did you know, bro, if elected, Noelia Corzo would be the first Latina in the history of our county to serve on our county’s board of directors; and

WHEREAS, That’s cool, I guess, he says, thumbing through his Android; and

WHEREAS, You thick in the skull, boy, imagine her royal flyness at the dais; and

WHEREAS, Did you know 3 or more Latinos constitutes a Brown Act violation; and

WHEREAS, You know what it means to have a quorum, to fight over policies instead of Jordan’s; and

WHEREAS, Oh, that sounds nice; and

WHEREAS, Did you hear what I jus—never mind; and

WHEREAS, for the rest of you, back there, I have searched far and wide for the whites who got the

stones to step aside; and

WHEREAS, we’re too young, we’re too old, too mother, too bold, too loud, too polite, too ethnic, too white, too humble, too proud, too much gold in our mouths, too many endorsements, too many encounters with law enforcement, too vulgar, too cultured, too queer, too Black, too Indio, too drag, too fat, too many tats, too many cars, too many kids—and all of ‘em able to vote us in; and

WHEREAS, we’re asked to clean glass ceilings, never to break them; and

WHEREAS, say it with me Bro, San Ma-Te-O; and

WHEREAS, say it with me Papá, re-dist-ric-ting; and

WHEREAS, say it with me Atherton, multifamily zoning; and

WHEREAS, excuse me, neighborino, your Florida’s showing; and

WHEREAS, shush, the NIMBY-movie’s about to start, quick, put your HCD glasses on; and

WHEREAS, Palo Alto expands its registry for landmark homes; and

WHEREAS, Hillsborough segregates development for disabled adults; and

WHEREAS, Millbrae protests a project to house the homeless; and

WHEREAS, OK Ok, get this, I have the perfect solution for California’s housing crisis; and

WHEREAS, Ready? We all move to Woodside disguised as wildcats; and

WHEREAS, mountain lion rhymes with out of compliance; and

WHEREAS, Get ‘em, Attorney General Rob Bonta; and

WHEREAS, in case it gets too sketchy, the safe word is Builder’s Remedy; and

WHEREAS, Tony, why’d you stop the whip; and

WHEREAS, I’ve seen both sides of the Silicon Valley, one where I’m a success story, the other a statistic; and

WHEREAS, we’re going in the wrong direction; and

WHEREAS, RHNA, SAFER Bay, CEQA, JPA;

WHEREAS, EPA, EDD, 1099a, 501c3; and

WHEREAS, the consent calendar, the closed session, the policy and action; and

WHEREAS, no mames, who got time to learn all this shit; and

WHEREAS, Ya cállate, Antonio, the meeting’s about to start; and

WHEREAS, Julian’s greeting, I didn’t think that you’d come; and

WHEREAS, Laura peers out the dark; and

WHEREAS, Marisela moves her car so I can park; and

WHEREAS, the King Kong pizza ordered from Emmanuel’s; and

WHEREAS, the 13 stories proposed, higher than the Four Seasons hotel; and

WHEREAS, the tenants on the westside huddled inside a garage, the bonfire of an Apple laptop glowing their arms;

WHEREAS, for six hours they sit in plastic chairs, where they’ll live still up in the air; and

WHEREAS, the mayor closes the public hearing, their hearts on mute; and

WHEREAS, close your eyes, you can still hear its lute; and

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, from whence we came, the long rivers of our rites, the middle school gangs, city of non-prophets, city of thin pockets, city of the Boys & Girls Club right off of O’Connor, city of second chances, of free health clinics and wooden signs that shout to the fountaintops, Free at Last Rehab Center, city of E.B.T’s, of E.M.T.’s, of Pastor Virges preaching outta St. Mark’s A.M.E; and

NAW, ROGUE, BE IT A SONG, from whence we came, all those folded in the back of my brain, José Luis, Ralph, Dre, just like we hearsed at practice last night, ok, Malaysia, Janay, McNair’s Class of ’08, come juan, come jamal, report to the council chambers at city hall, 6:30 sharp, let’s hear it in alto, so Ms. Parker could hear us all the way from southside Chicago, hands where I can see ’em (grow old), all right, everyone, Behold, the richest hood in the world, East Palo Alto.

PASSED AND ADOPTED this year of my release, 2023, by the following vote:

AY’S: Thirty-Thousand Strong. Two and Half Square Miles

BAE’s: Mi Madelina. That’s It.

ABSENTS: The Homeboys I’ve Named

STAINS: These Frijoles on My Plate

        __________________________

       Antonio Lopez, Mayor

A TEST:                                                               APPROVED AS TO PERFORM:

__________________________                                __________________________

Shoutout to James, Our City Clerk                          This Journey’s Also Yours

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