Side A is the first half of a two-part poetic experience exploring the vast terrain of Caribbean identity and memory. This showcase gathers two acclaimed poets whose work charts a course through personal and collective reckonings. In this intimate and ceremonial session, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Trinidadian poet and mother of the late Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, and Roberto Carlos Garcia, Afro-Dominican poet, publisher, and elegist engage in a deep, lyrical conversation about motherhood, migration, music, and mourning. As son, father, black and first-generation American growing up in the 70s it was a time when Carlos Garcia’s consciousness was being shaped by hiphop which provided a respite and sanctuary for the dispossessed, unsure, othered and uncertain. Rooted in the Literary Botánica’s theme of Root & Remedy, this event is both reading and ritual – a moment to honor the power of poetry to hold what language alone cannot. From Caribbean folktale to hip hop lyric, this session becomes a healing altar built from memory and verse. It is also a powerful appreciation of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s poetry which itself is a masterful weaving of Trinidadian voice and American experience, capturing the cadence, spirit, and resilience of a diasporic self rooted in two worlds. Her use of Trinidadian creole is not just stylistic – it is an act of cultural preservation and pride, bringing the rhythms of her birthplace into the heart of the place she has adopted as home. In fleshing out the intricacies of Trinidad and the U.S., Cheryl’s work, a womb for memory, migration, and identity, offers readers a textured, multilingual understanding of what it means to belong everywhere and nowhere all at once. Through this dual lens, Boyce-Taylor reclaims space for Caribbean-American narratives with emotional depth and fierce tenderness. This conversation is the umbilical connection of Cheryl’s selves as mother and as woman. In many Caribbean traditions, grief is not meant to be hidden; it’s sung, danced, written, and witnessed. This session is a grief remedy, a sound bath, a soft protest against silence and forgetting. By placing two master poets in dialogue, we not only honor the lineage of storytelling, but invite the audience to plant their own elegies in the fertile soil of language.