I hope there's nothing in my teeth.
Thank you, Jason.
And it's funny.
Although I just met Jason, we're kind of
on the same page with this.
I just gave a reading in Anchorage.
And I was wholly unprepared because I spent the whole night
cleaning my house and baking cookies.
And this time I resolved I was going to be prepared.
And I came up with a game plan.
First I'm going to spend 30 seconds messing
with the microphone and then keep going, then
have Frances do it.
OK.
Is that all right?
Yeah.
OK.
So my game plan is-- since this was kind of being invited
for the first book and then the second book just happened
to come out like right when I was leaving my house--
that I would do a little exercise-y plan of reading
poems from each book next to each other on the same topic.
So of course the topics I chose and that
were present in both books are birth, love, and death
because that's what it's all about.
I mean, it's not going to really be birth, love, and death
because the birth will be birthdays.
And the love will be infidelity of course.
And the death is spring because you know why.
Spring leads to death.
OK.
So let's keep going with the exercise.
Let's see if it works.
I love being prepared.
OK, one.
This is the birthday poem.
And I it's funny because I am a Virgo,
and I just had my 40th birthday.
And so this poem from my first book
is called "30 Years Rising."
"I needed to point to the buildings
as if they all stood for something, as if Detroit could
rise again into its own skyline filled in as it always
is inside me, each cracked sidewalk,
each of the uniformed girls braided and quiet as weeds,
each bicycled boy, each man with a car and a wife, the ones
I slept with and arranged neatly like a newly laid subdivision.
But I was driving with my brother who
doesn't like to think of the 30 years rising
inside us, the leavened truth.
He's arrived at the heavy black X of destination
on the inside of his forehead.
And he doesn't want to see me looking like this, open palmed
and childishly dressed with hip bones instead of children,
aching to put my sneakered feet on his new leather dash.
He doesn't want to hear me say something fucked-up,
something like, it's in my bones.
My sternum runs like Woodward Avenue.
It's pinnated, parked on, full of dirt, holding women and wigs
and cigarettes, bars lit from the outside.
It's overflowing with pool tables and ashtrays.
My ribs are holding up factories and breweries, two bedroom
houses and mutli-storied lives, this strip, this city,
these side streets, a bony feather.
He's lived here all his life.
But I gave up these streets for so many others.
I have turnstiles to ride the metro, memorized El tracks
and Muni stations until I had a huge worn subway
map on the inside of my head but couldn't get off at any stop,
couldn't begin to live in any city,
and couldn't sleep with anybody but myself.
I gave up this body for so many others.
I've been both an exaggeration of myself
and someone who looks just like me but sounds different.
But now I'm back to visit both.
And I need to point to my first hotel room,
to the mortuary above which my tall half Chinese, half
German punk rock boyfriend fingered me in his bed--
like a book in his little bed."
Yeah, I got a little excited, sorry.
And to the hospital where our bone mother
died so late or so early that we were both sound asleep--
I didn't say it, but my sternum is breaking with this.
It's sinking like Woodward as Detroit rises
around my brother's turn, rises and falls, falls not
at all like this light summer rain
but hard like somebody else's memory, insistent, unwanted,
but suddenly and again being claimed."
So that was "30."