All right.
I'm going to read you the most Chicago poem in the collection.
[LAUGHTER]
"A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring."
Spoiler, there are rats.
[LAUGHTER]
If anyone's ever lived in Chicago, or rats
are really scrappy.
[LAUGHTER]
When I am a stranger to my own ruin,
twilight reminds me to give alms to my best sins.
March, this city is purging.
In the humility of worms, salt washing from the grasses.
When I breathe in, I say thank you.
When I breathe out, I say gone.
I say garden.
I say guns.
Three crows devour the dead rat.
"Look at all that booty," the man
mutters and blows me kisses.
The sky is worthless, and my bulbous ass
is always a dinner bell.
I run farther.
I run with the feather inside my ear.
I run from a bird with a broken neck
and follow the sound of thawing snow.
Aren't we all boundless, though the way a dream
secretes the morning after, the way
moths feed on the eyes of fawn.
Two and not two.
Vines that strangle trees never say they're sorry.
I reach the lake with this graceful ache in my throat.
And if I say, my body is its own crumbling country.
If I say, I am always my own home,
then what does that make me?
I was told never to ask questions in poems.
And I think that's cockamamie.
[LAUGHTER]
I ask a lot of questions.
[LAUGHTER]