This poem is about--
often, there are times, I should say, as a poet,
that you get invited to places like this.
And it's a remarkable experience.
And you know that you're there because you have been invited.
And there are good people who have your back
and like your work.
And then there are times that you show up to a place,
and you realize you have been invited
because they had needed to fill a slot,
and it's a particular slot.
So this poem is called "The Contract Says--
We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual."
When you come, bring your brownness
so we can be sure to please the funders.
Will you check this box?
We're applying for a grant.
Do you have any poems that speak to troubled teens?
Bilingual is best.
Would you like to come to dinner with the patrons and sip
Patrón?
Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable,
but not complicit?
Don't read us the one where you were just like us--
born to a green house, a garden.
Don't tell us how you pick tomatoes and ate them
in the dirt, watching vultures pick apart another bird's bones
in the road.
Tell us the one about your father stealing hubcaps
after a colleague said that's what his kind did.
Tell us how he came to the meeting wearing a poncho
and tried to sell the man his hubcaps back.
Don't mention your father was a teacher,
spoke English, loved making beer, loved baseball.
Tell us again about the poncho, the hubcaps,
how he stole them, how he did the thing he was
trying to prove he didn't do.
That's a true story.
My father did do that.
He was in a teacher's meeting, and a man
said that all his kind did was still hubcaps.
And he went out and stole the man's hubcaps.
[LAUGHTER]
Talk about poetry classes.
And then he came back and sold them--
tried to sell them to him.
[LAUGHTER]
And when my father retired from teaching,
they gave him a silver plated hubcap.
[LAUGHTER]