I’m finishing up fulfillment for last month’s successful Kickstarter for my collection, Poems from the Garden: A pandemic year in sonnets & sloppier forms. I’ll be signing all the books that folks requested in the next few weeks and I expect everyone will have all of their seeds/books/postcards/ebooks by the next of the month.
I’m still writing a sonnet a week for the Friday Journal, and will probably share the ones I like best either here or on my Instagram. Here’s one from last week I enjoyed:
I saw a pregnant lizard hiding in the garden on the
chiaroscuro edge of light along the dark side of a new- built plant bed, inching
up and down to warm and cool her big full belly with the spring sunshine. I’m sure she’s
The campaign is currently funded at 141% over goal. It has 3 days left, after which point I’ll put the book up on Amazon where folks can buy it in paperback or ebook. But the celebrate meeting the project’s goal and the last 3 days of the campaign, I wanted to share the poems I’ve been posting on Instagram. Each are illustrated with images from the Smithsonian museums’ Open Access project, a database of tens of thousands of pieces of art licensed under Creative Commons 0, dedicating them to the public domain.
This book of poetry was always designed to be a small book. I wrote each poem with about a dozen people in mind: the volunteers who come to the community garden each Saturday that we can gather together in a socially-distanced work party. I wrote these poems for the people mentioned in them, and I’ve been so grateful that others have also found something in them: a pinned-down memory of an awful, strange year; the bit of hope many of us found in growing things during that time.
I’ll keep writing a poem every week for the Friday Journal, the weekly newsletter for St Stephen’s in-the-Field, the church that hosts the community garden. I’ll keep posting updates online about the work we’re doing in the garden.
Tomorrow we’re planting trees on the campus surrounding the community garden, oaks that will — with luck, time, and care — still be growing strong in 250 years. If you’re interested in coming to help, comment, message me, or text me. We can always use more hands.
So, if you’re interested in backing the Kickstarter, you have 3 days left. There’s some cool rewards, like native seed packets, a custom poem for your garden, or an audiobook. It’s been fun figuring out how to self-publish this small book and once again, I’m so grateful for everyone’s love and support.
Tonight is my 21st meeting serving as on the San José Human Services Commission and my 13th meeting Chairing that commission, so I thought I would do a quick round-up of what we’ve done since I joined in January 2018.
I’m making this post for two reasons. One, is I’m doing my annual evaluation of my volunteer commitments, to see where I’m doing the most good. Two, is the city of San José redid their website and links to nearly everything of value I produced for the commission (reports, press releases, work plans) now only leads to dead links, so I wanted to make an archive of my own. All of the documents below are the official versions.
Below is a work in progress. In the next few weeks, I’ll be trying to find copies of each of these files. Some because I’m proud of them, some because I refer to them often, and some because I want to remember how I spend my time as a volunteer.
2018
Note: Any month without an agenda or documents is a month when we did not have quorum and so could not meet.
This is the meeting where Josue Fuentes, District Attorney’s Office of the County of Santa Clara confirmed none of the 280 women arrested for sex work had been charged or referred for services.
The commission unanimously voted to send the press release, op-ed, and letter to council, via our staff secretary. We were told we could not, as commissioners, share the release or submit the op-ed without the approval of the City Council Committee on Community and Economic Development; we sought that approval and never heard back.
The commission also voted unanimously to send a letter to Immigrations and Customs
The major actions in 2020, from my perspective were:
December 17, 2020: We voted to ask the staff secretary to send the vendor who will be conducting the fully intersectional gender analysis survey a letter of welcome with our committee members’ contact information, along with a copy of the version of the Women’s Bill of Rights that gives trans and cis women the same level of protection, as well as providing women, non-binary people, and men the same level of inclusion.
December 17, 2020: Statement from the San José Human Services Commission in Support of the Santa Clara County Sanctuary Law (our staff Secretary was instructed to send this to Council and the Mayor): “Dear Mayor Liccardo and Honorable Councilmembers, The Human Services Commission of San José strongly supports the Santa Clara County Sanctuary Law as written (Board Policy 3.54). Deportations do not prevent violence. The threat of increased deportations actively harms our undocumented neighbors, friends, and family members. In solidarity, the San José Human Services Commission.”
