Manifest Differently Poetry

An exploration of the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on multicultural communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, as well as its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, addiction, and the outgrowths of resistance and resilience to Manifest Differently

Manifest Differently is a multifaceted project featuring 38 multigenerational artists and poets. Using literary, visual, and media arts storytelling in conjunction with public programming, the collaboration will interrogate the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on multicultural communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, and addiction, and the outgrowth of resistance and resilience – giving fire to movements for social change. As recognized in Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in 1983, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and others that have followed, we must acknowledge and witness the impacts of our history before we can move forward, otherwise the same injustices will be repeated, as we have seen most recently in the case of Israel’s genocidal treatment of Palestinians.

Storytelling is a powerful tool to help provide deep witness, compassion, and inspiration.

Manifest Differently was conceived and developed by poet/artist Kim Shuck and CAMP co-director/ artist / writer Megan Wilson and is co-curated by Shuck, Wilson, Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Amy Berk, and Katayoun Bahrami with support from California historian Barbara Berglund Sokolov, CAMP communications director Veronica Torres, and humanities advisors Mary Jean Robertson, Kyoko Sato, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Anita Chang, and David A.M Goldberg. Audiences were introduced to the history of Manifest Destiny and the forward vision to Manifest Differently through the lens of a diverse multigenerational team of artists and poets, whose histories and experiences include those of American Indian/Indigenous, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Southwest Asian, and North African (SWANA), and white/European American descent.

The project was exhibited in 2023/24 in collaboration with the following presenting partners – Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP,) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Artists’ Television Access (ATA), Minnesota Street Project (MSP), San Francisco Public Library, Book Castle, the Beat Museum, Book Castle, San Francisco State University, and Stanford University.

Participating poets, artists, and humanities scholars include:

Poets: Aileen Cassinetto, Avotcja, Clara Hsu, Dena Rod, E.K. Keith, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Genny Lim, Josiah Luis Alderete, Kim Shuck, Lauren Ito, Linda Noel, Lourdes Figueroa, Mahnaz Badihian, Maw Shein Win, MK Chavez, Stephen Meadows, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tureeda Mikell, Voulette Hattar

Visual and Media Artists: Adrian Arias, Afatasi, Amy Berk, Anita Chang, Barbara Mumby-Huerta, Biko Eisen-Martin, Carolyn Castaño, Chris Gazaleh, Katayoun Bahrami, Kim Shuck, l. frank manriquez, Marcel Pardo Ariza, Megan Wilson, Rene Yung, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Shonna Alexander, Vaimoana Niumeitolu, Victoria Canby

Humanities Scholars: Dr. Anita Chang, Dr. David A.M. Goldberg, Dr. Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Dr. Kyoko Sato, Mary Jean Robertson

Manifest Differently Curators’ Statement

Manifest Differently began as a dream of cross community dialog about ongoing damage resulting from colonialism and empire building. The idea had its roots in a phone conversation between Kim Shuck and Megan Wilson. Three years, metric tons of politics, global pandemic, family tragedies, community collaborations, gallons of paint, late night poetry sessions, joyful public printing events, miscommunications, group mural painting, loss, births, more caffeine than is probably healthy for any of us and some tantalizing flashes of hope later we offer up the work.

– Kim Shuck and Megan Wilson, Curators, Manifest Differently

Kim Shuck

Pulling into October in the
Wake of a full moon in the
Light of
Planets of
More news from
Residential schools the
Kitchen rainbows before
Noon and the
Whiplash between
Small comforts now and
Attempted
Genocide
Ongoing
Aches me as this
Cinnamon month shakes free of the
Husk of a dry
Flammable
September

-Kim Shuck

Tureeda Mikell

Manifested Differently-The Recipe
© by Tureeda Mikell, Story Medicine Woman

Wrap in one god, one fate, one baptism
Detach Sky chief from earth women children family
Break female from holy trinity
Debone natural conception ability
Collect Adam Eve Mary Joseph stories
Steep them in artificial insemination
Salt flesh heavily in Sin,
Mark missed, born broken,
Cure virgins, women, and nuns in husband Jesus
Strip sexuality
Bathe in virtual reality
Look but don’t feel, smell but don’t taste
Whip in self-flagellation, denial, deprivation

Add, you can’t have your cake and eat it too
Prepare one reel each of
Frankenstein Step-ford Wives stew
View until contradictions thicken
Combine hegemony’s lex-is-con
Hex will run non-causal micro aggressions

Skim magnetic poles …Dislocate souls
Crystalize dissonance
Float canine-dog obedience
Fetch, heel, stay, obey
Poach the field they’re in or play
Manifest destiny’s virtual reality
Will change accordingly.
Pan fry tenderized Vagus nerve
Infuse holograms
Reduce somatic cortex signal,
Sensory input
Make sure there’s no there, there.
If intellect or mindfulness declines due to
Coming-apart-of-mental 3rd eye
Good! Use it!

Squeeze manufactured consent into physiologic tenant
Place over high flame, drip-in fear, war games
Expel cellular immunity
Inflame diseases with impunity
Form big greasy balls of brand name trends

Blend biomechanical upgrades with side effects
In 100 page three font Greek Latin incoherence
Cream parasympathetic nervous system
Note apps with device buying addictions
Spread robotic voice rhythms
Place GPT on hypermedia racks
Serve generously on platters that matter
Gage how many psyches crack or
Who gets fat simulating alternative facts.

You’ll have consumers
Oblivious, autistic, lustfully numb
Renunciate survival instinct become
Manifested for a Destiny monetized for blindness!

This sugar high ice tea was brought to you by
The Law of exclusion
Masters of Biz Science
Where sterilizing the public’s mind
without their knowledge
is their most important product.

Stephen Meadows

Wild Fire

The rusted moon
rules red
over smoke
hundreds
of thousands of acres
the whole west
is burning
Here in the
dark early morning
on another hot day
the tinder
the brittle grass
slopes of these
hills sense
the fire leapfrogging
the gulches
running fast
before the sun

-Stephen Meadows

Maw Shein Win

the air over there
for our aunties & uncles in Burma

the air they can’t breathe
the breath they can’t take
the air we can’t share

air is smoke
smoke is air
over here, there

from soldiers’ guns
young ones shoot their own
villagers forced to flee

they hide in trees
leave homes behind
can’t see the air

over there
ahead last breaths
in the river bed

blackouts abound
omens trigger rituals by regime
junta boss tightens screws

not in the news
aunties, uncles try to breathe indoors
keep windows shut

we’re at alert, trees on fire
will we ever share air
over here, there

-Maw Shein Win

Mahnaz Badihian

Imagine

In a world where every door adorns,
With love’s flower stem, free from chains and thorns,
No locks, no fences to constrain our dreams,
Where children, like birds, are in sunlight beams.

Hand in hand, they walk with joyous feet,
Bellies were full, hearts were light,
and their pathways were neat.
To schools they go, unburdened by despair,
No fear of shadows lurking, none to scare.

Dogs and cats, as fellow citizens stroll,
With patient women and men, a harmonious role.
Imagine together, we all could dwell,
No war, no bloodshed, the stories we’d tell.

In this realm, people revere the earth’s expanse,
A world where human loss brings a heavy glance.
Fruits, trees, and plants where cannons once stood,
Anthem and poetry replace anger for good.

2-
Road

If I could become a road
soft and gentle,
for you to walk on, I would
if you could carry love
on your shoulders
On this rough path.

3-
Butterflies

In my world, butterflies wage war,
Their beliefs intertwined, like ours,
Bound together from all directions,
Hidden wounds, no one sees the scars.

And this somber cat before me sits,
Unaware that loneliness is the same,
For both of us, it equally befits,
No footsteps echo in this lonely game.

Commuters with wounded feet,
Return from a world of madness,
Seek the wondrous Land so sweet,
Where butterflies fear the breeze’s gladness.

From where did we escape, I ponder,
To find ourselves against this towering wall,
A Land that wields an axe, it squanders,
And scatters its roots on sorrow’s shorefall.

-Mahnaz Badihian

Manifest Differently at Book Castle: Genny Lim, Kim Shuck, MK Chavez, Tongo Eisen-Martin

Linda Noel

18 Treaties with California Tribes
by Linda Noel

Your progress runs in a line

We build our fires in a circle
Our homes in a circle
Live seasons in a circle
Believe in sun and moon
In a circle

As west as west could be

All this after
Intrusion
Disease
The rush for gold
Destruction

Your progress runs in a line

Westward
To the edge
Of vast valleys and deserts
Mountains and rivers
Sharp cliffs and unforgiving sea

Your progress must include us
And will prove to be
Unforgiving-ly and brutally
Destructive

Lauren Ito

Lessons in Love
Lauren Ito

“Grandma, what was it like during the war?”

[silence]

“Do you remember where you were the day of Pearl Harbor?”

[silence]

“When did you and grandpa know you didn’t belong?”

[silence]

My grandmother taught me sometimes love sounds like silence
The craft of forgetting a language of practiced protection

Let me love you until this pain only rattles in your marrow, without seeping into skin
Let me love you until chosen stories evaporate from the mouths of your sons and daughters
Let me love you until you won’t be torn in two by a country that never learned how to
reciprocate love

Her stubborn tongue
Loved
And loved
And loved

Through our questions

until her last breath.

Rewriting our creation stories
I excavate love languages from crusted riverbeds
Weave poems from the fossils
Artifacts must be inherited.

Genny Lim

Photograph of Gaza

A little brown girl
crawls out of the abyss
of her home
From afar, she could be a
sparrow blown from a nest
or a frond severed
from a charred palm
She is crawling
inch by inch
with broken wings
in search of spring
She cannot stop digging
through the rubble with
her ashen memory
trapped at the bottom
of the abandoned well
by the stone steps where
perfumed lavender and rosemary
once swelled her nostrils
where the smell of her mother’s
taboon once streamed through
the kitchen window and
where the sunflower once lifted
her bright yellow face towards the
burning heat of a thousand suns
in search of heaven

by Genny Lim

Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu

Story # 3 We Are Still Here
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu

The West Berkeley Shellmound,
her Native woman body rests under asphalt, luminous mana silenced by a parking
lot, man-made and mundane,
she is their private property owned by a white settler family who refuse to negotiate
with Indians.

On the battle grounds in Huichin and in ‘Uiha,
Under the hands of missionaries and mercenaries,
our childrens’ bones hung from trees like decomposed fekika fruit
the flagrant sour taste on our tongues
when we thought all was lost

the Sacred was there, she picked up our memories, ancestors left for dead
fed our mouths with the flesh of sweet acorn and salt water from her breasts
we grew strong,
fearless,

she weaves the circuitous dance of death and birth into her long black hair,
dreamtimes exchanged through collective breaths, from our Moananui to Huichin,
she coughs origin stories, birthed before his arrival, innumerable constellations,
they grow in our altars like the flowing yellow pua garlands in our hair

she is survivor, creation, Creator
always here

yes, we remember, the stories of us after the missionary and mercenary are gone.

Dena Rod

field of vision
dena rod

each time the sun rises, give me a poppy and i’ll grow another beacon with vision despite the darkness. here outside hands refused help when their beloved’s deaths could be brushed under dirt rugs, relegated as tales of bad actors grew anew. we see women sick for freedom despite their eyes being shot out, resisting pellets attempting to block sight for a future where their hair can blow free.

the state wishes for another grave to dig. give it to the spiders to hunt them without burden. feasting spiders on old webs to spin new homes for us to live in, littered with eyes before and after everything went dark.

here in this land we tend, hope is never in the past but building a memory of a bright future. it’s not desperation, yet a command. we will not bow to a regime that doesn’t hand down a future worth living. i’ll dance in multiple glorified mirrors with veils snatched from my own youth on foreign soil to make it so. yet this soil became home, deep-sighted despite best intentions.

give me a poppy each time the sun rises, and i’ll trudge through cloth with midnight bright within eyeshot. her lost eyes will keep me warm, the center of each red petal dipping into pollen to bring sweet honey into golden light. filter and dig our courage into a well-worn meadow to grow unruly with liberty.

give me a poppy each time the sun rises and i’ll wash away the target on their heads, spiraling curls shining in the sun beckoning attention. the artifice amongst propriety buffs into a veneer of foolish safety. with malice glittering in storm-backed smiles promising something worse lingering above the horizon once more, a refusal. no more capitulation to a regime eating itself inside out. it would rather kill you than itself. what else does power want? perpetual motion for growth that doesn’t exist.

give me a poppy each time the sun rises and i’ll take you deep within a cave, where hearts beat a well of red palm prints. freedom greets us as markers of entropy. each circle daubed with mercy, despite the utter brutality meted out on our bodies as we climbed into its quarry. they whisper like palms do when hitting scarlet blooming flesh, each step breaking new ground, trampling fresh growth waiting for youth to breath into each step.

the path is long yet we shall still walk it together. i know where eyes go once they are removed from freedom’s skull. into skilled hands skinning fur, handing them to the spider. she will weave them watching the trail to justice unfurl. each day is eaten and folded like a fitted sheet, each eye smashed into the ground to create fertilizer

for poppies to grow.

fir

Manifest Differently at the Beat Museum – Dena Rod, Kim Shuck, Linda Noel, Steve Meadows

Clara Hsu

On the Death Sentence for Palestinian Poet Ashraf Fayadh in Saudi Arabia

In November 2015, Palestinian Poet Ashraf Fayadh was sentenced to death by beheading for apostasy.

Don’t make martyrs out of poets
for they have long been shunned by the populace.
Don’t elevate their status
make them more important than they are.
People won’t care if their ears aren’t pricked.
Don’t prick their ears.
Don’t make them turn to poetry again
by the swipe of your sword.
Don’t make them sell
S E N S A T I O N
S E N S A T I O N
will surely stir minds.
Don’t stir the minds.
Let poetry sink to the bottom of the mucky river.
Let poets be the lowliest of artists.
Let them rant, rave, kick up some mud.
No one remembers once they sat with kings
unless you make martyrs out of poets.

The Saudi court overturned the death sentence three months later, imposing an eight-year prison term with 800 lashes.

-Clara Hsu

Aileen Cassinetto

A Short History of Journey

The fault, dear Arcturus, is not in your star.
I’m afraid we misread the swells
like explorers mistaking one continent for another.

“Columbus stretched out Asia eastward until Japan almost kissed the Azores.”
“The Chinese treasure fleet had been mothballed long before Magellan set to sea.”

In other words, they were imprecise, and they perished.

(Behold the flight of birds on rarefied air,
from breeding ground to wintering ground.
Behold intention, and its kin, precision.)

Be that as it may, we were always meant for motion.

See how the Silk Road was paved with horses’ bones.
And more than smuggled silkworm, it brought sugar, silver,
paper—utter world changer.

See how the Spice Trade flourished,
shoring up an empire, its galleons—implacable bearers of a slave
trade from Manila to Acapulco.

The world got its cinnamon, its cocoa, its cassia and cardamom,
its lapis lazuli, and its Balas Ruby—ancient and sapphire-veined.
We got wanderlust.

And the bravest of us looked up and remembered everything—
the fixed star, the dippers, the king, the queen, the bear-keeper—
rubescent and fourth brightest in all the night sky, dearest,

remembered also the cardinal of old fields and every roadside—
brilliantly blue and sometimes true—in the same night sky,
roaming its way home.

-Aileen Cassinetto

Avotcja

The We of Us

When I write
I dress yesterday’s visions in today’s rhythms
And I Tap Dance all over the page
With every Poem
And with every single word I write
I am reliving
Everything these cultureless cultures
Have tried their best to bury & replace
With the sadness of their emptiness
And I continue to sing
Keeping the Ancestors alive by singing their Songs
Expanding tradition with new words in strange Lands
I am the recognition of all the traditions
The Soul-less have tried to erase
But
With a Giant thank you in “our” hearts
We joyfully climb out of the acceptable respectability
And are reborn in every Poem we write
We sing to you through the rhythmic fire of Samba
Every Rumba reinstates your presence in our DNA
We cry the unashamed truth through the bluest of Blues
Exploding like La Bomba in the face of colonial Insanity
And boldly “Fight The Power” with Doo-Wop, Hip Hop & Jazz
I refuse to silently accept
The unacceptable suicidal demise of our existence
When every single Day I can taste the we of us
Striving
We are more than just surviving
We are cultural alchemists
An undeniable force of creativity in motion
And through our creativity
We decolonize our legacy & free our minds& spirits
We are a whole lot more than you & me
It’s all about the you in me the me in you the we of us
Writing our way out of the delusion
Of
Manifest Destiny’s self-righteous madness
And reinvigorating the dreams our Ancestors died for

By Avotcja

MK Chavez

Mixed Blood

Dark skin as table centerpiece at all family events centers, especially holidays.

Family joke:
as question of genetics
as observations on the peculiar meanderings of DNA
as questions of paternity.

Father tried to whiten himself with creams and a blinding rage of self-hatred
then he married a light-skinned woman.

At the age of seven, grandmother made me watch a telenovela.

Storyline:
Woman who gives birth to twins
one white and the other Black.
The mother gives away the Black Twin.

About the novella, the girl’s grandmother says
Everything comes back to haunt you.

Father made a family tradition of denial.
Grandmother liked the agony of telenovelas.

The novella’s resolution for the conundrum of the twins is the revelation of a Black grandfather.
They don’t say blame, but when they talk about the Black child, they say poor thing, and innocent
in the ways that missionaries used those words. Like weapons.

Family joke:
The father denies the daughter.
Doesn’t know where she came from, was she the milkman’s.
But milkmen were of a different era
There were never any milkmen delivering milk in our neighborhood
just my father’s fantasies.

When she is the topic of conversation. Poor thing. So curious. Erasure. And yet a thing.
Being the type of creature that at a different time might have been taken on tour.

∞

When the girl is no longer a girl, she will meet a birder who is fond of noting that is difficult
to identify seagulls because of their prolific miscegenation.

M—i—–s—–c—-e—-g—-e—–n—-a—–t—–i—–o—-n

He elongates the word; loves the sound of it in his mouth.

Miscegenation as teratology and memory thief. Not so much.
Othering of other. Denial.
We rise.

Carry the story on our skin.
Never forget.
Transformation and survival
of the beautiful kind
what we mean is
nothing is truly lost.

That endless question? What are you?

are

everything

everywhere.