I want to move to this new book that should be out any day now
from Arte Público Press.
It's a book of love poems.
It's a book all of love poems, love poems and anti-love poems.
In the world today it seems the most revolutionary thing
you can do is love and love passionately and love well.
Anyway, like I said, these poems move from love poems
to anti-love poems.
This is one of the latter.
And the book is called From the Cables of Genocide,
Poems on Love and Hunger.
And at the time I was newly divorced and facing something
they call the feminization of poverty.
Not a new concept but anyway so this
is what this book comes out of.
And this is a poem--
this is also a bus poem, a Greyhound bus poem.
If any of you have taken a Greyhound bus across country--
I recommend it by the way as an educational experience.
But anyway, you know that the bus stops at Salt Lake City
and stays there.
Going one way, it stops at 6 o'clock
in the morning in Salt Lake City,
and it doesn't leave until 7 o'clock that evening.
And the time that I hit it was on a Sunday.
So nothing was open except for the Tabernacle.
And I'd already seen that, right?
Nothing was open at the same time.
I had decided that I wanted to move
from California to Colorado.
So I very bravely got all the money
I had and bought this bus ticket, one-way bus ticket,
and I got on.
And I didn't have any food.
I didn't have enough money to eat.
I was waiting until I got there.
So I didn't have any food.
I was stuck in Salt Lake City fasting, right?
I was very hungry.
I didn't have anything at all to eat
except for a little box of raisins
that I found in the bathroom in Salt Lake City.
So I didn't have anything to do.
So I sat there and relished my raisins
and wrote this poem called raisins.
"Raisins are my currency to date, slightly seedy,
prickled as my nipples, black as pubis,
colored as my opened eyelids.
I tongue you, fricatives, into vowels.
I suck you to the scabs you were forbidden fruit reminders.
Never mind the way I found you deserted in the Depot stall.
No matter how this small red box was once a child's lost wonder.
You're the gift of grace swept up off the bathroom floor.
You're my only food today, the day
I left you paper husband, widow name.
Our final meal was sweet.
You hovered over me an open package beating blades
to froth, teething me the way I like it,
both lips bit and shriveled as our last fuck you.
You are black with rust and will restore my blood.
You're my prize of faith stave against starve.
I eat it, grateful for the brief exchange.
28 tips of fate, three good sweats
they soaked in sun as you now soak my spit.
Sweet as acid, damp as rot, this hunger as your memory
feeds by chance."