It’s 2019 and I’m running for Assembly District Delegate for the CA Democratic Party, District 51! 
 
What is an Assembly District Delegate? 
The Assembly District Election Meeting delegates are one-third of the governing body of the California Democratic Party. These delegates vote and conduct business, on behalf of the community they represent, at the yearly State Conventions, including the elections of CDP Officers, the election of up to 25 State Party Regional Directors, California Democratic Party legislative endorsements, ballot propositions, CDP Resolutions and the California Democratic Party Platform.

AD Delegates are elected by voters (to participate in the ADEM you MUST be a registered Democrat in that Assembly District. You can register on January 26th, at the Assembly District Election Meeting at East LA Rising).
 
There are 14 Assembly District Delegates, per district, elected by voters every two years. There are 80 Assembly Districts in California.
 
Why am I running? 
​Since 1995 I've mostly been a registered Green Party voter, because I've felt that that was the party that aligned closest to the issues I think need prioritizing. But at this very moment in time we’re witnessing a cultural transformation within this Democratic Party, to one that’s more reflective of the values that are at the center of every major city in the United States, and in every home across the areas of the country that have had to tolerate racism, classism, xenophobia, and bigotry for far too-long. We’re witnessing a revolution led by womxn of color, by people who transcend gender binaries and who transcend identity constructs, by politically engaged refugees, by indigenous leaders, and by communities of diverse faiths. Now more than ever is when the Democratic Party needs to hear our voices so that this growing number of progressive voters do not participate in this system in vein. I’m running for my parents, my grandparents, my neighbors, my child(ren), and for yours. 
 
If you’re in AD51:
Which includes Chinatown, City Terrace, Cypress Park, Eagle Rock, East LÁ, Echo Park, El Sereno, Edendale, Frogtown, Glassell Park, Lincoln Heights, Montecito Heights, Monterey Hills, Mt Washington, parts of Pico Union, and Silver Lake…And you wanna help out with my campaign, or help out our People’s Action slate, please email at [email protected]
 
I'm so proud to run as part of one of the most progressive slates representing Assembly District 51. I whole heartedly endorse every one on the slate below, each has been dedicated to fighting for justice in communities that make up our district. You can visit the ADEM website to read their statements. You can also visit our AD51 People's Action website for more information! Come out on January 26th and vote for us!! 

This one is called, replacing trees with walls. a richard meier study. To be in nature, to be on top of nature, to be against the natural. To be so powerful that you can move Earth to the side, in order to build a castle, to fill it with things, to fill it with the history of other people. Other people who will always be referred to as "other" people. The gates will shut. Please make sure to get your ticket validated.

January 13, 2013 is when I fell in love with Writ Large Press, it was the morning after Billy Burgos’s launch party at Beyond Baroque - thank you Billy, for the introduction! Most of you know that story, if not ask me in private! I then began to love all things Writ Large. I followed them and their doings, and then we'd hang and scheme for nights at Spring Street. We laughed, loved, hated, and cried together, and we shared similar beliefs on what “books" mean to us, the people who write them, and the communities they serve (and don't serve).

Then, Writ Large invited Poesia Para La Gente to participate in LAB•FEST in 2013, and the book fests in 2013 and 2014. And then #90for90 happened and I was formally invited to join this amazingness, whom I'd already grown to love. And so it began. And it was because of Peter, Chiwan, and Judy, and our little community that I learned how to navigate and process this thing called publishing, and all that it encompasses, and all that our lives encompassed over the past three years. And these past three years have been a lot: good, great, difficult, and everything, so I’m forever grateful in finding forever friends-like-family in those three amazing people. And yeah, I’m also grateful for being able to work on books by brilliant writers who also happen to be good people, like Wendy C. Ortiz, Rachel McLeod Kaminer, Ashaki M. Jackson, Mike Sonksen, and Teka Lark. And it was through Writ Large that I met some of the folx that I'll be fortunate to call friends for the rest of my life.  Plus, have I mentioned how awesome it was to be a part of all of those events we put together, on that spectrum of what we see as being literary!? It’s been a fun/wild ride for sure!

But sadly, and happily, life brings us surprises. For instance, three years ago I had no idea I’d ever be married again, (and to someone so wonderful), but more importantly seven years ago when I began this journey,  I had no idea I'd find this kind of fullness in my life. But I worked hard at letting me be me. This is how I found the friends I have now, the beautiful people in my life, that I love so much. This is also how I found it in myself to return to school, to return to the work I’m most passionate about, and to allow myself to learn, fuck up, grow, and experience. And with that comes shifts, in purpose, goals, what gets us excited, and how we choose to process how we learn new things. 

Sadly, I'll be stepping away from Writ Large Press as a partner, but I’m excited for what’s in store. I owe it to them to make room for someone who has the capacity for a commitment greater than mine. Soon Writ Large will be publishing a new series of chapbooks, and 90x90 is on its way, and thanks to the many supportive friends and volunteers who’ve stepped up to help make this happen! I'm looking forward to all of this!! And I'll always believe, and hold close to my heart, the mission of Writ Large Press and it's founding partners, as expression of the politics we need in the world - yesterday, right now and always! 

As for me, I’ll be announcing some new projects soon, one is a small publishing project, another is an advocacy/data project. Beginning this fall I’ll be pretty busy with finishing school while working freelance putting events together, helping other folks with events, designing books, working on community projects, working with Ave 50 Studio on things, and working to fight displacement and societal injustices. I'm also working on my first book which is requiring a surprising amount of research, but feels so good to be able to actually do. But also, and more importantly, there are some pretty exciting happenings on the home-front, which of course takes the cake! 

There's an endless amount of joy and experience that I can write about, but I'll stop now, too many tears for a Tuesday! I'm so grateful for everyone I've met along the WLP way, and I'm equally grateful for this literary community we call home. So much more to come...see you all on the other side! 💜

XO Jessica

resist. disrupt. transgress.



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90x90
If you're interested in helping WLP with 90x90, in production, curating, presenting, reporting, spreading the word, etc. OR if you'd like your work to be featured for an evening - please FILL OUT THIS GOOGLE FORM.

Notes on Mondays. (to expand on later)

Today is Monday. It's the day of the week I decide to leave my apartment, by apartment I mean the inside. I know how the clouds look; billowy and easy to associate with something else, like maybe the freeway, or my Monday destination. In other words, I don't have to look forward to the clouds anymore. I have my Mondays.

She helps me with my becoming, and going. The learning how to live again. Or for the first time. Like Mondays. The beginning of the new week.

This is how I welcome the July's. I was born in July and I'll be born again in the soon July. Born again because we sometimes have to relearn what it means to love. Because we forget, like walking past your neighbors aloe vera plants when you were a child. But you never knew they were there, or that they could heal what would leave a scar, did you? They were always there & reborn because when you were in the womb you didn't want to leave, you knew the world was waiting to scar you. Indefinitely. So you stayed too long, a week your mother says. Until they forced you out. But if they forced you out just six days earlier, you would be an entirely different kind of galaxy, than the one you were reborn to be & Jessica would be Julius & Julius would be Quintilis & everything could be anything, but water lilies would still be born from the garden you'll grow in eight days from today - separating the next from yesterday. The ceremonial tea is for the happiest of July's & happy July. ❤️

I miss my hometown & summer will never again meet us on neutral ground & tails are pulled like magic, from the broken bodies of lizards. No one will ever know why some things don't take their time in moving from one place to the next. It just happens. The moving too fast to allow the missing. But I miss and keep missing & all I remember is the before, but maybe that has nothing to do with now, and everything to do with home. If home is defined as a place you've built good memories in, the only home I've ever had is becoming left over sketches of a poem that may or may not make a tail of all that's broken. Someone once said that missing is a virtue. And so the missing will have to make up for the absence of normal summers. But I'd trade this poem and virtue, to stop anyone from missing what a home use to be. #HLP

I'm learning the difference between a secret and a lie, and I'm learning that secrets can destroy what it means to be human. In an effort to encourage my communication and to destroy secrets among us, I've been sharing my therapy sessions, in the way I know best, so far.

• • •

Falling in love with Mondays because she has a way of returning to me the time I've lost, in bits and pieces, and it only takes an hour each time.

I prefer to walk while retracing the hour that I gain. It's easier this way, to remember the things we wanted to say but didn't, and the things we should have said, but left them to "the next session."

The thing about getting to know therapy after thirty two years off and on, you learn to read faces, energy, secrets and lies. And therapists have secrets too.

We talked about missing things that we don't have. That we've never had, or that we very momentarily had. And how everything that makes me happy today, reminds me of those things.

Secret #1 : I wasn't suppose to forget.

We spoke about bodies in peace. A body without the deafening highs and crashing lows all at the same time, the oscillations - physical and sound, without the immediate and dramatic biochemical response of our bodies interaction with ourselves, after inappropriate amounts of sleep. We spoke about bodies without conflict.

But this is not my body. My body wants me to stop keeping secrets, my body wants me to know it by name.

Sometimes we feel everything over and over again, because that's what being alive feels like for us. We can be scared of the outside - the confrontations between two, the conversations that end with someone walking away upset. The screaming and yelling and pushing and pushing. Until someone gets hurt. It's scary, the outside. And that's not where I belong.

But I learned today that this is where I live. But it's not a place I visit, or somewhere I call home, or something I look for. There's an entire city that makes a home in my body. The environment, landscape, and culture that sleeps, wakes, and plays inside. The screaming and yelling and pushing and pushing. It's the comforting confrontations with ourselves. Over and over again. Until they become not so comforting oscillations - physical and sound. And there's always a hurt. And this kind of screaming doesn't leave room for a conversation. And I don't want to know you, if it means we'll not be able to tell each other everything in the world that might make us feel everything, over and over again. I want to know I can be sad with you. That we can be sad together.

There are places for us, the ones who since children have carried cities inside of our bodies. Places where we can find room for conversation. That friend we call home. That place we call sun. Where we sleep, or just listen to the silence outside of our city, another home. The river. And where we only think about today, and no worrying about our next hour or next Monday.


​

Dear fellow feminists, gentle women and men of color,

I need your help. I understand the process of voting. I understand the need for policy and structure and spending for structure and for this semblance of democracy, in order to make a more perfect union. After all, it is getting a little bit better for so many of us folks that aren't defined by the white, male, heteronormative folk who decided to re-found this place brown blood has called home for thousands of years.

I understand this process, so I will be voting this year. But not for President. But I want to vote for a President. And as a feminist, I'd love to vote for a woman. But. And there are so many but's. Help me understand why anyone can vote for someone who is willing and ready to push the big red button.

I no longer believe that war, in the way it's defined by our administration, is necessary or even helpful in promoting peace. Who's kidding, I never believed in war for anything. There is no other righteous excuse for war other than the purpose of promoting peace or exterminating evil. And even those excuses have been proven to no longer exist as excuses to spend 3.9% of our GDP on defense. That's $596 billion, which is triple the second highest nation in the world (quadruple if you go by the other report), a part of which is used to murder [innocent] civilians, usually brown civilians, and a part of which is used to create policy that destroys lives across the world. Interventionist policies that have shown to nurture femicide and rape culture - across the world.

And the candidate who is least quick on the trigger is, as an alternate or second to war, very much an advocate of sanctions, which has sometimes been known to do more long-term harm than war.

And to be okay with war
is to be okay with military
is to be okay with a police state
is to be okay with collateral damage
is to be okay with the
[fill in the blank] industrial complexities that make this country "great again"
and again.

Why and how is there a politician worthy of making this okay for anyone, how do our feminist-blooded brown bodies, histories, hearts and minds make this all okay, under the theory of democracy. How is any of this okay, to vote for? I want to know what good justifies the illusion of democracy , when history (and future) knows we can exist without being oppressed, without being owned, and without the need for voting for a President.

They were conversations on motherhood. It was Mother's Day. And also, these conversations happen when you're preparing your emotions for the soon-to-be-wedding. We were talking about mothering, motherness, motherlessness, and the future, and in her own way - because everything she does is in her own way - she reminded me that even in the absence of motherhood we are allowed to see a future - as opposed to what society would like us to think. And society is always trying to have a conversation with us, in the throes of womaness, womanhood, violent conversations. Mother's Day can be a bitch sometimes. And this is where baptism uncovers its rewards. The crying turns to thought, turns to laughter, turns to, "Thank you Mom. I love you." And then conversations of fatherhood, from this view atop Mother and Daughter Mountain. It's a beautiful thing what's happening in this uncertain generation. Men are being brought up to believe in women, to maybe think that the man alone might be more than just the mighty protector, or hunter. Because to be equal, is to be nobler than just a hunter alone. To look straight forward, into eyes, and to listen, is a better kind of protecting than what came before. This generation of this countries men are beginning to see women for who they are. And who they are is more than whats on paper, and women are more than women, and paper can burn, and women carry the matches. In other words, the thought is no more than what ends up counting. So when the generation of men that came before this generation decides to fuck up, the fuck up is greater than usual. There's an apology that sits higher than the bar that sat before. And now our boys, young men, are lost in not knowing how to solve the problems men before them created for those he loved, and who loved him. All that's left are a few unopened letters and broken pieces of man waiting for forgiveness. And I hope Father's Day can offer conversation between Man and Son, to make a mountain.