Hello everybody. How are you? Welcome to The Other People Show. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. It's good to be with you on a Sunday. It's a Sunday episode. And my guest today is Daryl Alejandro Holness, author of the poetry collection Stepmotherland,

available now from Notre Dame Press.

Here is Daryl Alejandro Holness reading a poem from the new collection entitled, Praise Song for My Mutilated World.

Ode to the Japanese radio, oozing hot tunes in the hot afternoon of my childhood at age four in La Ciudad de Panama at my abuelo's house.

Ode to the black women made of air and imagination, Hupito and I dance with in his living room in La Rosita,

the rosy part of Rio Bajo, known for turning bullets into blooms.

Ode to La Olwa Braz, the early 90s Brazilian siren in Kaoma, who seduces us into dancing

with our dream girls, and away from the bullet-bitten bodies

plastered across the front page of La Critica News. Ode to the famous mulatto melody, howling from the bellows of the accordion on the record,

and to the Portuguese words I pronounce in near Spanish as I try to sing

along to the forbidden dance song.

Ah, record a sauv, I'll be with her to mela, where I record a saul, I'll be to be to

bring bra some brown There isn't much forbidden in my family

Except Piedra and Yerba and the Tidoteo from their trade

There isn't much forbidden in my family

Except pistolas and sequestros

Enchanchoods and corruptos who've become pietra slaves.

Pito and I save the Negras in our arms from Piedrero's, drug dealers and the cartel, with our Moreno swing hips,

dips and spins to the two-beat, carring bow drum rhythm stronger than the pulse thumping through my little boy body

until I can't tell the difference between my korezong and the radios tong-tong until our dream girls become our real women.

Until we've praised, danced our world back to being one that little brown black boys like me can believe in.

Okay, that was Daryl Alejandro Holness, reading a poem entitled,

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