WEBVTT

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All right.

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I'm going to read you the most
Chicago poem in the collection.

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[LAUGHTER]

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"A Woman Runs on the
First Day of Spring."

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Spoiler, there are rats.

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[LAUGHTER]

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If anyone's ever lived
in Chicago, or rats

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are really scrappy.

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[LAUGHTER]

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When I am a stranger
to my own ruin,

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twilight reminds me to
give alms to my best sins.

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March, this city is purging.

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In the humility of worms,
salt washing from the grasses.

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When I breathe in,
I say thank you.

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When I breathe out, I say gone.

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I say garden.

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I say guns.

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Three crows devour the dead rat.

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"Look at all that
booty," the man

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mutters and blows me kisses.

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The sky is worthless,
and my bulbous ass

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is always a dinner bell.

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I run farther.

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I run with the
feather inside my ear.

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I run from a bird
with a broken neck

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and follow the sound
of thawing snow.

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Aren't we all boundless,
though the way a dream

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secretes the morning
after, the way

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moths feed on the eyes of fawn.

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Two and not two.

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Vines that strangle trees
never say they're sorry.

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I reach the lake with this
graceful ache in my throat.

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And if I say, my body is
its own crumbling country.

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If I say, I am
always my own home,

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then what does that make me?

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I was told never to
ask questions in poems.

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And I think that's cockamamie.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I ask a lot of questions.

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[LAUGHTER]