She thinks I'm funny.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
I am bad at talking or banter, so I'm just
not going to do that.
I'm just not going to talk to you all.
Is that OK?
Because I hate you.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
So I'm going to first read a couple of poems from the book,
and then I'll read some newer works I'm working on.
OK.
"I want nothing to do with my mother's sadness.
Her mouth a pockmark on every door
that opens onto a memorial
scene, her mouth, the beginning of traffic.
Odd to think of it as a ugly and frequent song on the radio.
A small bird shitting and dying in my hands.
He is dead, she says over and over again,
except in Vietnamese.
Which to me doesn't sound as tragic.
A little uglier maybe, but less tragic for sure.
The house phone on her lap sings its dead hum
into the static air of our living room.
Who?
Who, I ask.
I shake her shoulders, who?
When she finally looks at me through the slit
of her black bangs, she tells me about the man
she would have married if she stayed in Vietnam.
And my posture straightens, and my eyes roll.
And I'm relieved at the absence of my own grief,
and I hate him.
This man, this dead man that won't stay gone.
Now that he's gone for good.
Now that he has built a house of meat to rot and stew
on the sunniest days.
Now that he fills the marrow in each bone of my mother's regret
when she thinks of love.
Either she's a widow or divorced.
And I believed for a while that regret
is leaving the burning house empty handed,
but he is already ash.
And I tell her she made the right choice.
Which is funny, because I hate my father
and often forget that he's still alive."