… Jim began by reading a poem about immigrant deaths as a result of operation gatekeeper which resonated with Angel’s painting of the border hanging behind him…Alberto was the last one to get up and stood in front of photos hanging on the wall of him with the Brown Berets. His spoken word expressed sorrow and anger for what had happened and included the pride he felt for our community because of the way they cared for the victim’s families. His poems also expressed his struggles with addiction…The forces of all the poets were very powerful. The poems, although unintentionally, served as narratives for the images hanging in the room….Walking through Chicano Park on the way home I saw Diego and told him we had missed him at the open mic, (his poems and drawings filled the middle room of the gallery) he apologized and said he had fallen asleep and just woke up. My intuition told me he was using crystal meth again…the damage meth has done in our community somehow is what I was left with by the end of the night and what awoke me in the early hours as I wondered what the space, the ‘gallery’, could serve as.