The Bottom Line Coffee House

The Bottom Line Coffee House prides itself on creating a safe space for people in the community. One of the ways they do this is by holding an open mic night. We headed over to the Bottom Line Coffee House for one of these special nights. We're at the Bottom Line Coffee House. We're a third apprentice. We're about three blocks away from my state. We're in what used to be called the Cascoridore. I think one of the most radical things that we do is that we listen. We create a place where people can be themselves, where people can say what they're holding heavy on their chest. And I take pride in that. Welcome to Open Mic at the Bottom Line. This is a full crowd. Usually people But this is also This is awesome. I hope you're comfortable. Guidelines for the open mic. Do whatever the hell you want on stage. Don't be racist, sexist, homophobic. I will probably say something about it. I'll start with a poem. Garden City was the kind of city we always lived on the edge of. We rolled up swishersweets and crews through its streets paved with bruised leaves and our smoky chariot. An 01 Ford tourist with a dent on the front left b Cracked white paint. It was a place There the perimeters of plazas were perpendicular with parking lots for the $5 shoe outlet where we got our shoes for prom and some Wednesdays. And the beauty supply where we got our fake eyelashes. Those of us would pluck them all out There they had tanning salons named for their vacation destinations with their families. Palm Beach, Hawaiian, back to the beach, Tropic Sun and Boca. There worked the white girls, their orange shoulders Our brown boys took them to prom instead of us. People who are not exposed to Muslim narratives, people who are not exposed to the Arab narrative. Our villainization is so visible to them but our fear is not visible. Our fear is people coming from those parts of the world. Our fear for our own safety, our own lives, our lives of our loved ones. The fear that we have for the lives of people that we care about are people who are from the same places as us. It's completely invisible. I think that is one of the most palpable things that I've learned after 9-11. That was that we even felt before 9-11 which is that our narratives are not commonly known. Our narratives are even brushed aside. Our narratives are invisibleized. And so poetry for me is a means of understanding my own story and understanding it in a way that actually communicates not only the narrative itself but the feeling that comes about with that narrative or even an abstraction of that narrative into a feeling in itself or an object of poetry in itself hoping that I can develop a language around that to communicate that and to let it live on the page without necessarily having me be the one to have to communicate it. And it's my story. There are plenty of other stories that are out there or that need to be communicated that I think that we need to create more environments to pull out those stories, safe spaces to be able to communicate those stories. Were the ones who moved on up to neighborhoods without train tracks, tracing them No nerve endings sprawling to abandoned homes and factories, no automobile industrial complexes with floodlights, constellating them despite the smoke and its thick stink, familiar to the children in classrooms a quarter mile away. Okay, it's almost an understatement to say that there is an enthusiasm for poetry in the Arab community or in the Arab American community. I think that there's a way that poetry has sort of Mahmoud Darwish is a Palestinian poet whose work has been translated into, Those songs are I mean even in the Arab Spring, you'd see videos of people during the protests who were just reciting poems in the middle of the protests. And it was these were, specifically it was the words of Mahmoud Darwish. So I'm not saying that I'm necessarily following in that tradition, but I'm h But I think poetry for me is a way for me to understand my own experiences, express them and hope that other people will be able to connect to it. There in Garden City where anthropologists do not roam, nor do they graze the streets to feed on awnings written in liturgical languages. There the FBI does not look through the suitcases people carry beneath their tongues. My parents, here, 30 years, are self-taxonomized homing pigeons. I heard them in the bathroom one day clipping each other's wings. I heard no words, only trilling, and the crack of scissors on both.