The only good thing left in San Francisco is the Speaking Axolotl Reading Series at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery.
“White folks, we’re mostly happy you’re here.” Josiah Luis Alderete is unafraid of provocation. He does not bother with tonal genuflection while informing the palest faces in the audience that they are not welcome on the mic if there is a Latine person who aims to read tonight. From the jump, it is palpable: this might not be a space for you, but it is most definitely a space for us.
Josiah Luis Alderete is unafraid of silliness. Sometimes he opens the night with “fuck all of you!” and we know intuitively that the words are said with welcome and warmth. Before the poetry commences, he asks if anyone has neighborhood chisme to share. I have yet to hear any particularly scalding pitter-patter get spilled, but I’m eager for the night when someone gets messy and gossips freely in this moment Alderete carves out for rumor, scandal, and news from the block.
Roasting, playing the dozens, reading: these are sacred arts for brown folk who came up on stoops and corners, and Alderete — who co-owns the bookstore with Tân Khánh Cao — teases with familial affection, engaging the theatricality of props like a bullhorn named Leiticia and a charged-up, ready-to-go stun gun.
A stun gun is scary, even in the hands of a trusted revolutionary. It is also a concrete reminder of what’s happening, always, in this country. The bookstore is a sanctuary from supremacies myriad, and we are here ultimately for political engagement. We can pop in and rib each other a bit, cast tiny fake invectives that are funnier and lighter than the abuses lurking outside, but literature must be more than just amelioration. We anchor ourselves in thought — in poetry — as preface to praxis.
Josiah Luis Alderete is unafraid of sincerity. He sermons on the poets who shaped his early life with sodden eyes and righteousness in his voice. He speaks with passion, deference, gratitude, and when he acknowledges the rich and intertwined historias that had to happen for Medicine for Nightmares to be born, a timeline of writers and workers and stores and spaces past comes into view. The people he loves are pendejos and primos both.
At the Speaking Axolotl Reading Series, you are going to get roasted and you are going to get loved on.
The night goes like this: five open mic readers (again: please step off, white folk), the featured reader, five open mic readers. Read in Spanglish if you want. Read in Spanish if you want. “You are under no obligation to translate!” Alderete shouts to a writer who starts to re-read a poem in English. Once you pop up to this Latine-centered series more than once, it becomes obvious that there are neighborhood institutions within this neighborhood institution. That is to say: there are people afoot who have clearly invested years into the Mission, years into decolonization, into liberation and justicia.
Tread carefully, Todds and Melissas of the world: this stage is sacred. If the list is full and your name sounds suspiciously caucasian, you about to be at least side-eyed. Alderete makes this clear and one man is gracious enough to raise a hand and rescind himself from the list. Another is unceremoniously kicked off by Alderete himself, who then recites one of his own pieces from memory.
Memory is imperative to what is happening within this space. Ferlinghetti once asked What is poetry? and over the course of several third Thursdays, lessons are imparted to the Speaking Axolotl audience. ¡Fíjate! Per recent mic-takers, poetry is:
- memoria
- what we use to mark place
- power
- resistance
- an emergency
- revolution
- healing
- communication with ancestors
- communication with futurecestors
- love
One month features Filipinx writers curated by Bay legend Barbara Jane Reyes and every Pinoy on the stage has a foundation in her work they are bursting to share. One month Angel Dominguez is the star and asks us all to hum together, a wordless meditation on spontaneous connection that arises from and surrounds us. The next month, Zander Moreno Lozano — who four short weeks ago was a virgin open mic reader — taunts staid narratives of state and gender with defiance and fury and a little bit of nervousness. Every time their words take root as regeneration, a girding against colonial erasures. We are inspired by other brown folk and so we act.
How do you know you are home? How do you know you are amidst familia? Some rooms feel immediately intimate in their very manifoldness, in the trust that unfurls from looking around and noticing that the browns, queers, kooks, coots, poets, prophets, hoes, homos, homies, and hermanos have all shown out tonight. If all of us are Other, then none of us are Other.
Its promise is its name: medicina para pesadillas. A place where possibilities are inhabited, not imagined. Pop pills if you need ‘em, but wash ‘em down with some book-learnin’. Track down truths in the rhythms of an unfamiliar tongue. Give up the bestseller list for the most inscrutable zines you can find. Shun ease as sin and soothe yourself instead with literature. Words, philosophy, theory, thought: balms, balms, balms, balms. Come into this room where the global literature section is the whole world, as it should be.
Nightmares abound. While obscenities — of houselessness, inequity, state power, state violence — boil over, Alderete and Cao continue to build. Reading series, letter-writing, film showings, workshops. music: the space vibrates with opportunities to act. And, also, sometimes there are empanadas. I saw it with my own two eyes at their third anniversary party: at the revolution, there will be champurrado.
The words of a poet are therapy; tiny tonics to help us through the muck. Medicine, really. “Think of this place,” Alderete says once the last open mic reader wraps up, “if you need medicine, if you need time, if you need space.” Tough times ahead, tough times behind, but a hard swig of poetry might just cure what ails ya.
“We’re gonna make it,” Angel Dominguez declares as his reading comes to a close in February, and we will, sin duda, por cierto. Of course we’re gonna make it. We always do.
There are an infinite number of good things left in San Francisco. One of the brownest, best good things left in San Francisco is the Speaking Axolotl Reading Series at Medicine for Nightmares.
Speaking Axolotl is a Latine reading series that occurs the third Thursday of every month at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery on 24th street in the Mission. Follow Medicine for Nightmares for more on upcoming readings and events on Instagram, Facebook, or sign up for their newsletter on their website.