Ep. 31: Mason J.'s Poems and Stories of Survival

To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we'll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We'll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit. San Francisco artist and poet Mason J. is a survivor. They were born in the city in the late 1980s into two epidemics that were wiping out entire communities—AIDS and crack. In this podcast, Mason J. shares three poems and a story about their experiences with death, something that has surrounded them their entire lives. The first is a pantoum poem about dementia called "All of My Uncles Are Dead." The second is about the Ghostship fire in Oakland in 2016. The last poem is about Mason's personal experiences with death. Mason ends the podcast with a story about their sister, who was born HIV-antibody-positive. This episode was recorded at our first-ever live storytelling event: Working with Death, at Café du Nord in April 2018. Photo by Anica Wu