[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles, and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: On August 13th, alongside Grant Hier, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Anaheim, California, I co-hosted an event, A Day of Poetry in Los Angeles, at the Los Angeles Central Library. More than 100 local poets were photographed for the Library’s Archives and 62 poets read their work in the Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium. I was the happy recipient of a recent book of one of the attendees, traci kato-kiriyama. kato-kiriyama is an award-winning multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary artist and the author of Navigating With(out) Instruments—based on unceded Tongva land in the south bay of Los Angeles—. Of this collection, poet F. Douglas Brown says, in part, “here kato-kiriyama lays out our necessary practice: create art that celebrates community collaboration…"

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Los Angeles is (such) a Scorpio" by traci kato-kiriyama

"Los Angeles is (such) a Scorpio"

No, don’t try to convince me with its Virgo assignment at
			       birth.
        You want to know how I know LA is a Scorpio?

			         I/You
(you live here long enough and then travel out of town, then
		     likely You at some point)
			   (definitely I)
			 meet someone
	                 usually somewhere not here,
in the company of that person’s longtime or born-and-raised
			     living place,
		        and as soon as they ask
		    “Where’d you come in from?”
		 	 I can barely say “Los Ang/“
		                and there they go:
			               People
	      make all kinds of assumptions about us,
			passing judgment
	      brimming with assumption, fixed ideas,
	        and increasingly negative narratives.

    And then you realize a half hour into the conversation
        they’ve never spent more than a weekend or two,
       more than a Disneyland trip or stop in Santa Monica
                  or the Venice boardwalk or Sunset Strip
       or maybe Chinatown, but really just Far East Plaza,
     nowhere anywhere close to the bones of our arena, nope,
                                              nope, nope.

         Just like that time an ex had screamed into the phone
                                upon learning I am a Scorpio
                           that they don’t ever fuck with Scorpios,
				ever.

What’s your sign anyway, San Francisco?

N.T.S.
Ok, at the very least, L.A., Neptune has got to be in 
Scorpio.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

[Music outro]

• Back to Poems on Air: Episode 77



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