Thank you very much.
Great turnout.
This is my first time in Tucson.
And I already learned one very important lesson about Tucson.
Ah, don't pet the cactus.
[LAUGHTER]
I tried to get one of those prickly pears,
and instead I ended up with a two handfuls of spines,
I believe is the word.
So if you see me grabbing at my fingers
during the course of the reading, I'm not hallucinating.
Or if you hear me shriek during the course of the reading,
it is not performance art.
It's cacti.
I suppose I was trying to figure out
what the equivalent would be.
The equivalent, I guess, of someone from Arizona
going to Grand Central Station in New York
and giving their bags to a stranger.
That's where I'm from.
I'm from Brooklyn, New York.
And I'm going to start off the reading by, basically,
talking about the two worlds that I inhabit,
which is the world of New York City, where I'm from,
and the world of Puerto Rico, where my family is from.
And I'll begin with the Brooklyn poem.
This is a poem from an earlier book, which
was published by Bilingual Review Press,
out at Arizona State University.
And the poem is based on a childhood memory.
It's a memory of a march through the streets of my neighborhood,
the East New York section of Brooklyn.
I was 9 or 10 years old at the time.
And what I recall are candles--
people lighting candles in the rain,
and lighting them again when they were put out by the rain--
all in honor and in memory of a short order cook
named Agripino Bonilla, who was murdered in East New York
section of Brooklyn, in 1966.
The poem is called "The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue."
"A wooden box rattled with coins for the family
on a stoop where the roots of a brown blood stain grew.
Brooklyn, 1966.
Agripino Bonilla was his name.
A neighbor, the yellow leaflet said.
A kitchen worker who walked home under the scaffolding
of the trains at night, hurrying past street lamps
with dark eyes.
He was there when the boys surrounded him,
quick with shouts and pushing, addictions hunger in a circle.
When he had no money, the kicking began.
The mourners clustered at the storefront, then
marched between cadaverous buildings down Alabama Avenue,
as the night turned blue with rain
in a heavy sky of elevated track.
The first candle struggled-- smothered, wet.
Onlookers leaned warily as they watched.
A community of faces gathered and murmured
in the dim circles of light, kept alive by cupped hands.
In the asphalt streets shined black from rain,
in windows where no one was seen,
hesitant candles appeared.
A pale blur started on the second floor.
Another trembling glimmer slipped to the back
of the march, then more.
Multiplied into a constellation, spreading
over the sidewalk, a swarm of candles
that throb descending tenement steps
in the no longer absolute dark, as if the moon had
shattered and dropped and burning white pieces
on the night.
His name was Agripino Bonilla.
Spoken remembering every $60 week
he was bent in the kitchen, his children who could not
dress for winter and brawl against welfare
taunts at the schoolyard.
The unlit night that the sweep of legs
was stopped by his belly and his head.
And the grief of thousands illuminated city blocks,
moving with the tired feet of the poor.
Candles a reminder of the wakes too many and too soon,
the frustrated prayers and pleading with saints,
in memoriam, for generations of sacrificed blood,
warm as the wax sticking to their fingers.
And years of broken street lamps bowed with dark eyes
or addictions hunger waits nervously.
Over the wooden box, a woman's face
was slick in a drizzle of tears.
Her hand dropped coins like seed."
So that's Brooklyn.