WEBVTT

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I'm going to read one
more from my book,

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because I actually forgot
to bring the other poem that

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was in the Journal.

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And then I'll end on
the Spanish poem, so.

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I have a lot of fruit
poems, I'm realizing, so.

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And you know I'm also
thinking, like, I

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have a pillow when I travel.

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I carry my own pillow with me.

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So now hearing that
[? just messed me all up ?]

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[LAUGHTER]

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I have to catch a red-eye
tonight to Milwaukee.

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But I think I'm going to
leave the pillow in the car.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I don't need it.

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"I watch her eat the apple.

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She twirls it in her left hand,
a small, red merry-go-round.

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According to the
white oval sticker,

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she holds apple number 4016.

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I've read in some book or
other of 4,015 fruits she held

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before this one,
each equally dizzied

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by the heat and the
tips of her fingers.

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She twists the stem, pulls
it like the pin of a grenade.

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And I just know somewhere,
someone is sitting alone

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on a porch, bruised, opened
up to their wet white ribs,

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riddled by her teeth, lucky.

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With her right hand, she lifts
the sticker from the skin.

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Now the apple is more
naked than any apple

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has been since two bodies first
touched the leaves of ache

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in the garden.

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Maybe her Apple is Macintosh,
maybe Red Delicious.

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I only know it is the color
of something I dreamed,

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something I gave to her after
being away for 10,000 nights.

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The apple pulses like
a red bird in her hand.

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She is setting
the red bird free,

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but the red bird will not go.

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So she pulls it to her face,
as if to tell it a secret.

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She bites, cleaving
away a red wing.

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The red bird sings.

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Yes, she bites the apple,
and there is music--

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A branch breaking, a ship undone
by the shore, a knife making

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love to a wound, the sweet
scrape of a match lighting

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the lamp of her mouth.

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This blue world has
never needed a woman

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to eat an apple so badly,
to destroy an apple,

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to make the apple bone.

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And she does it.

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I watch her eat the apple,
carve it to the core,

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and set it wobbling on
the table, a broken bell I

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beg to wrap my red skin around,
until there is no apple.

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There is only this woman
who is a city of apples.

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There is only me,
licking the juice

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from the streets of her palm.

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If there is a god of
fruit, or things devoured,

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and this is all it
takes to be beautiful,

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then god please let her eat
another apple tomorrow."

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[LAUGHTER]

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[APPLAUSE]

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