Thank you.
It's so wonderful to be here for so many reasons.
University of Arizona Press is the home of my books,
and they're amazing, so I'm glad to be here.
And I'm also glad to be here with three of my favorite souls
in the world, J. Michael, Roberto, and Francisco,
so I'm really glad to be here.
Thanks.
I'm going to read--
I have a book--
Arizona is bringing out my next book.
It's called Milk and Filth, and I'm going to read from that
and then I'm going to read a few new poems.
The Milk and Filth is, I guess, an homage
to second wave feminism.
I guess that's enough context.
[LAUGHTER]
This poem is called "Radicalization."
An agitator holds her sign up asking, do you feel equal?
So you and your sisters deride her,
because she's so public about injustice, so second wave.
Your sisters gather around her with scorn and sully
her earnest nature.
It's, thanks but no thanks.
I can vote, walk into the pharmacy for my Plan B,
and wear a chain wallet.
One sister throws an apple into the melee,
and the unfazed agitator bites it.
Her straight block teeth break the fruit apart,
which shocks your sisters.
But when they've abandoned their mockery
for the lure of a choice bazaar, earrings,
UGG boots, removable tramp stamps, the Sex and the City
marathon, you're hot for the agitator.
The crowd clears and you kiss her sweaty neck
and use her agitating sign as a bed.
You scrawl her agitating words onto your belly
and stand naked against her muscle memory, not just
the cause, the impulse, the result, but the buzz of lack.
You'd like to consume it right out
of her, that humming electric dissatisfaction.
Then you like to put it out of your body
in the form of a Louise Bourgeois sculpture,
milky, blobbing.
Love the star fuckery of doing it with her and to her.
Then the sticky pulling apart, the eternal production
of polyurethane eggs wrapped in yarn.