So I'll read some poems from my second book, "Alight."
And it was really a book that was in conversation,
or a continued conversation, with the first book, "The Earth
in the Attic," which I had written
in part after my experience with Doctors Without Borders.
So, I'll just begin.
"Tenor."
"To break with the past or break it with the past,
the enormous car-packed parking lot
flashes like a frozen body of water, a paparazzi sea
after takeoff.
And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly,
because the kittens could survive
under the rubble wrapped in shirts of the dead,
and the half-empty school benches where
each boy sits next to his absence
and holds him in the space between two palms
press to a face.
This world.
This hospice."