Thanks, Gabriel.
When I found out yesterday from Tommy
that you were introducing me, I thought
that couldn't be more perfect.
It's not just that you're my former student,
but that you have also found this
to be the same safe space that have cultivated all our voices.
Thank you.
Short person here.
Can you guys hear me?
OK.
Thank you all for coming out here.
It's crazy thinking that six years ago I came here
and, surprise, surprise, I'm one of those two people
who have not left.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, so this first poem I'm going to read
takes a line in response to one of Alice Notley's poems
from the Descent of Alette.
It goes, "Can you find your father?
Yours is probably an owl.
Mine is probably an owl.
I imagine freedoms granted from regime changes and failed
negotiations.
One.
The fact that I was below Unter den Linden
didn't compel me to make the lewd man pay for his resolve.
I would learn Godowsky, manipulative whim, on my own.
Two.
When my eight-year-old self improvised on the piano,
I asked, how come I can do that?
Inside me a person plays the piano perfectly.
Do you remember your father, asked the lewd man
before disappearing into the U-Bahn.
Think mine is in another room.
It's an entire house on the summer fire escape
or a musical intersection.
I put on a spook extremophile dress and gossip
about how every anaerobe color is lonely or expansive.
The most pleasing neurosis would be erotic civic hope."